by Christopher Cumo

PERHAPS THE 21st century will be the era of the virtual classroom. In 1998, 1.6 million of America's 14.5 million college and university students took at least one course on-line, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. Between 1995 and 1998 the number of distance-education programs increased 72 percent, and 44 percent of our colleges and universities offered courses on-line in 1998. But the reality is that the virtual classroom links us to a computer rather than to people. We no longer need to question one another face-to-face in a tradition as old as Plato's Academy.

E-learning may not work because it thwarts our sociability. We are intensely social creatures. Our need to forge social ties is so great that we have sex less for reproduction than for cementing intimacy with another person, writes Jared Diamond in Why Is Sex Fun? Aside from the Bonobo, we are the only species in which men and women copulate face-to-face. Our sociability sinks roots deep in the soil of our prehistory. Evolution has given us a large brain, prolonging our infancy and childhood so we can absorb the culture our brains have created. Evolution has made us dependent on others most of our lives, molding us into the most social animal on the planet, notes Richard Leakey in The Origin of Humankind.

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