Sex and Education: Better Done Face-to-Face
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.
Our sociability is evident to David Noble, history professor
at York University in Toronto and opponent of distance education.
“In person you get a sense of me you can’t get on-line,”
he says. “I’m convinced of that. We have five senses. Why
artificially narrow the bandwidth?”
This constriction disconnects students from their communities
and one another, believes E. Wayne Ross, distinguished university
scholar at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. “Can computer-mediated interaction substitute for the human interaction-experience that is at the heart of learning?” he asks.
Aristotle asked students questions as they walked along the paths of the Lyceum. Andreas Vedalias and his students at the University of Padua dissected cadavers together. Indeed medical schools don’t educate students at a distance. The task of training physicians is too important and the value of face-to-face interaction too great to be done by proxy. The medical community is just that: a community, and whatever else distance education can do, it can’t build community. Even its supporters concede this point.
The virtual classroom is part of “the ‘cocooning’ of America,” says Bob Chrisman, who has taught on-line business statistics for Marylhurst University and human resources for Linfield College, both in Oregon. He praises distance education “as the second greatest democratization revolution of higher education–second
only to the GI Bill.” But it is a strange democracy, for the demos (the people) who take classes on-line are asserting their separateness rather than their participation in community.
The fact that distance education does not create community
is not a liability, according to Renee Aitken, who teaches
advanced learning strategies, strategies for motivation, and
global cultures on-line for Franklin University in Ohio. Today’s
students forge social ties at work and with family and friends
rather than in class. Some students don’t want “distraction
from others,” says Bob Corson, who has taught distance-education
courses for fifteen years at Saint Joseph’s College in Maine.
But who really does the teaching?
“I have to teach myself literally everything,” says Alicia
LePard, who lives in Wyoming and takes on-line courses at
Regents College in New York.
This is the Moses model of education. One must scale Mount
Horeb alone in search of the burning bush of enlightenment.
In a curious way, distance education reinforces the American
credo of rugged individualism, of the self-made man. But the
credo errs if it makes us appendages of computers.
“I think that sometimes students just get lost out there
in cyberspace, where there isn’t the attention on them,” says
Ken Alfers, history professor at Mountain View College in
Texas.
Without communal ties, students drop on-line courses at a higher rate than they do traditional courses. In fall, 2000, 42 percent of students dropped on-lines course at Tyler Junior College in Texas, whereas only 29 percent dropped traditional courses.
The drop-out rate is 11 to 15 percent higher for on-line courses than for traditional ones in the Dallas County Community
College District, estimates assistant chancellor Pamela Quinn.
These are the numbers of a moribund enterprise. In a sense, these students aren’t dropping a class; they are shutting down their computer, for the class exists only on-line, without the tangibles of a student’s furrowed brow and an instructor’s smile.
A classroom can create the momentum of a discussion that forces students to think on their feet, refining an answer and sifting evidence on the spot. This is the dynamic of interaction that stamps us as social beings, as creatures whose biology impels us toward one another. If sex is important enough to have face-to-face, isn’t education?
