Is College Necessary?

Is College Necessary in a Knowledge-Drenched World? By Trent Batson

We talk about "content" as if it's a commodity you can buy on Amazon. We talk about "delivery" as if FedEx could teach the course. We have devalued collaborative work by shouting "plagiarism" if students turn to each other for help or flout copyright laws, therefore leading to the delusion that young learners can (indeed should) learn alone.

If knowledge is just content and all you need to do is deliver it, and there is no social aspect to learning because individuals can learn alone, then of course people ask "Why go to college?" Our making education into a commercial transaction by our ways of referring to education has dug us into a deep hole. We would not have known how deep if the digital revolution hadn't shown us.

Learning is of course not content but a process that engages both teacher and learner, knowledge constantly alters because of that process, and all learning is social. Viewing learning as a social process which engages both teachers and learners makes the why go to college question moot.

9/17/2008

http://campustechnology.com/articles/67620/