JB: How does the Virtual University work?

SCHANK: The rise of the Virtual University allows us to reconsider education. It is reasonable to assume that education involves learning and we are all under the impression that school is a place where learning goes on, or at least it is a place where learning is supposed to go on. Business is so dissatisfied with the state of education today that we find corporation after corporation creating their own "universities" where employees may attempt to relearn what they failed to learn in school or where they can learn what they might need to know on their jobs. Even so, those businesses that have recognized that school didn't work out for their employees are nevertheless of the belief that school is the right model for learning Curiously, business training tends to be a copy of existing school systems. This seems quite odd to me, because everyone agrees that the schools are broken — although very few people agree about why they are broken.

At the beginning of my classes I usually ask students why they are in college and they tell me things like, "it is a four year vacation," "the parties are goo d," "it will get me a good job later," "it is what everyone does so I never thought about an alternative" and so on. The issue of learning never comes up. Why is that? School isn't really about learning at all. It is about certification. College students attend school to get a degree that they hope will get them something they want. They pick schools on this basis, and they attend school with the concomitant attitude. We never ask a student if he learned a lot, we ask how well he did. Self-evaluation is based on the judgment of others when it comes to "official" learning. Students feel they did well when others say they did well. It is the rare student who says that he learned a great deal and thus was very happy with his education.

Recently I attended the commencement exercises at Columbia University because my son was graduating. The valedictorian gave a speech in which she said that she had always disliked school and that while she felt that she couldn't help but work to be the best at it, she was sorry she worked that hard and would never do it again. It was an odd speech, and most people in the audience were upset by it. I, on the other hand, was happy to hear someone tell it like it is. Education ought not be a competition. Learning should be fun. The stress that students endure in school and the arbitrariness and general lack of real world relevance of what they learn make learning anything but fun.

While I was pondering this young lady's speech I glanced at the program notes and was reminded of why school is the way it is. The notes mentioned that the commencement address had been given in Latin until quite recently. Latin has been a dead language for well over a thousand years and yet still, because it once was the language of erudition it remained so for a thousand years. Talk about inability to change! How can we fix the schools if it takes a thousand years to get rid of something as basic as what language is being spoken!