The Internet and public education: Lessons from the Pandemic

Internet access for every child should be an integral element of public school education. Every student should have access to the Worldwide Web anywhere a portal exists. There should be a portal in every home with some minimum level of basic service at a nominal charge or no charge at all if the family meets the requirements for reduced cost or free meals at school.

Existing technology can easily provide such access. The cost and expense would not significantly impact existing Internet service providers (ISPs) although it might reduce their short-term profits. The cost of basic service for communication and education should be regulated by a national Internet utility commission established for that purpose. Any ancillary services, particularly entertainment, can be subject to the free market with no limitations on price other than competition among providers. Eventually the inexorable economies of scale will lead to more concentration of communication systems among a few mega providers and some kind of national grid for Internet communications which would be an improved equivalent of the National Electric Utility Grid.

There is also an immediate need to bring the Internet to rural and geographically isolated areas of this Country and throughout the world.

The lessons from the pandemic clearly show the potential of distance learning and the need for a nationally coordinated program for developing and distributing distance-learning content. There are a number of existing specialty Internet content providers such as Khan Academy, The Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, PBS, National Geographic, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and many other government agencies.

If the online learning experience now emerging throughout the country continues, it is likely to fundamentally challenge many of the education “cartels” rigorously imposed and often unnecessary and ineffective “standards.”

It should be relatively easy to shift the attention and efforts of many of the current employees of the federal Department of Education and the 50 State Departments of Education to the task of coordinating, consolidating, and organizing all of the available content materials and new material as it becomes available.

With a one-stop consolidated content source, classroom teachers throughout the country can assemble “lesson plans” to meet the needs of their individual students. Chat rooms for teachers would quickly evolve centered on particular content areas and specific content.

The Internet and distance learning may finally free classroom teachers from the top down imposed plans and procedures based on dogma promulgated by State and Federal educrats such as “common core” and “Value-Added Modeling” (VAM).

During the later years of his life, Andrew Carnegie recognized the importance of learning to the upward mobility of Americans and that consolidating knowledge and its means of distribution at the time — books and magazines — in free public libraries throughout the country would allow children and adults regardless of their economic state or social class to learn and advance.

Today, we do not need a massive capital building program for libraries as we did before World War II. The system for distributing knowledge and information already exists—the Internet. All that is required is access and once the barriers to access are removed then every human being has the power to learn all they can learn or have the desire to learn.

One remaining contribution which large institutions of higher learning might accomplish is digitizing their library collections, particularly those that are unique to the institution and not otherwise available. Once the university libraries are available online they can be readily added to the public library system where they are located.

Much of the brick and mortar that characterizes colleges and universities and accounts for a large part of their overhead and incentive for fundraising other than laboratories is now superfluous. Students should not have to pay exhorbitant hourly tuition fees to listen to a lecture and watch a professor as one of a large group of students most of whom will never have any personal contact with the Professor. The students can obtain the same information at home with an internet connection. Professors do not need classrooms; only access to a video conferencing device.

Eventually wise administrators at institutions of higher learning will offer quality instruction to students at reasonable cost and terminate the endless upward spiral of student debt. Institutions of higher learning can repurpose their buildings and substantially reduce their general and administrative expenses.

Faculty salaries will be based on “attendance” fees just as they were at the first universities during the Middle Ages. The institution will provide the platform for the Professors and the technical support necessary for their online lectures but the students will pay only for what they need and want. Those Professors who teach arcane or unpopular classes will have to earn their living from those individuals and organizations who are willing to support their teaching mission.

The tyranny of the textbook will finally end and teachers will be free to teach to the needs and aptitudes of their students liberated from the imperial textbook and free to develop content-based lesson plans and “webbooks” based on the needs and abilities of the children in their classes. There will still be a need for outlines and every area of academic inquiry will have some kind of syllabus. However, classroom teachers will have some freedom to attain educational goals according to the needs and capabilities of their students, not the mandates of educrats and administrators.

Of course, this will encourage more freedom for teachers in choosing and adapting the methods of instruction because the only goal is obtaining knowledge and building skills implementing that knowledge. The drudgery of drill and practice which stifled so much of elementary school education now exists in a variety of computer programs which allow students to proceed at their own pace and provide targeted assistance continuously as the student progresses.

Teachers can monitor the progress of every student through these self-directed exercises and provide the appropriate support and intervention when necessary. No child will ever be held back by a need to wait for other children to catch up nor will any child fail because it might take longer for them to master a particular skill. Eventually all the children who can will achieve the same basic skill levels at whatever point in their personal educational development is appropriate.

Of course, at the heart of this kind of education is a generally accepted belief in what level of skills children should achieve before they enter the workforce or continue on to education beyond the elementary and secondary school level. Once those goals for public education have become generally accepted, the tyranny of testing ends and instead of “standardized” tests marking a passage between arbitrarily established “grades,” a record will be kept of skill levels attained as they are attained. When an established set of skills and knowledge have been reached, the student will be certified to the next level of effort.

The model will be the progress through the “belts” which characterizes many of the martial arts systems throughout the world. Every student progresses at his or her own pace as far as they are able. The record of any student clearly and unequivocally identifies his or her skill level and the units of basic information and associated knowledge they have mastered.

How long it takes a student to acquire a skill or obtain a particular level of understanding about any specific area of human knowledge becomes immaterial as does the chronological age at which the student achieves a particular level of skill and understanding.

“Standardized” testing will become the means for determining only whether or not a student has achieved a particular level of skill proficiency and internalized a particular body of knowledge. “Passing” a standardized test will simply mean that a student is ready to move on to another level and learn new skills and acquire new information and knowledge. Education will be about learning not testing. Computer managed skill testing eliminates the practice of grade inflation that has come to plague secondary education in many areas.

The pandemic and the ensuing shift in the paradigm of public education must not be allowed to disenfranchise even more segments of our population. Children and adults with special needs still need education. They cannot be ignored. The pandemic must not be used as an excuse to eliminate education in music and art nor prevent children from obtaining the benefits of ensemble performances in music and theater or participation as a member of team in some kind of athletic pursuit.

School buildings still have a function in the lives of our children. It is just that after the pandemic, that function should be dramatically different than it has been.

As we work our way through the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see the importance of the Internet and continuing human communication in the advance of civilization and we should recognize the opportunity that the Internet provides to assure everyone a free and appropriate public education.