by Brian Tobin

Created on: November 20, 2008   Last Updated: February 20, 2009

It is time to be clear. Distance learning is nothing more than a thinly disguised con game on both the recipients and the providers. No one of any educational gravitas can argue that distance learning is either teaching or learning. In sober moments, educators must admit that distance learning is a con game designed to make attendance money for schools. What used to be the old match-book cover come-on has now become No Child Left Behind. Both are as phony as the Ponzi scheme which propped up the seven Bush years of prosperity. Somewhat like the Ponzi schemes, the most common justification now is that if one school doesn't do it then other schools will. Hence, education is caught in a vicious cycle of grade inflation and degree inflation which cheats both teacher and learner.

My musings are honest. I am a working public school teacher in my 34th year. I began teaching jr. high and high school for ten years and have spent the past 24 years teaching at a junior college. I have watched beside as the high school curriculum turned to gimmickry by watering down history and English offerings, experimenting with "new math," and creating alternative high schools for losers who might not be losers if school challenged them. Many high schools are now partly charfter schools. A play on the same scam. High schools have also pretty much managed to gut music and physical education programs along the way. These happenings may well have something to do with the obesity crisis in this country as well as the appalling lack of basic skills among too many school kids. They have everything to do with inflated administrative salaries while teaching salaries have remained flat.

I have also watched beside as community colleges and four-year colleges began Internet and correspondence courses as co-equal substitutes for face-to-face classroom instruction. I have seen such phony drive-by colleges such as the University of Phoenix emerge as degree-granting institutions of considerable profitability. The educationists have justified such chicanery by inventing catchy Orwellian slogans such as "thinking outside the box" or "different learning styles" or "encouraging diversity." Now even junior colleges are having to deal with "SLOs" or "Student Learning Outcomes" which are a bureaucratic off-shoot of "No Child Left Behind" and a foolish attempt to weigh rather than assess teaching. Teaching is, in fact, is a process of inspiring students in a passion for the abstract and an intellectual curiousity

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