Distance Education is Deficient Education

(With due apologies to all the exponents of distance education)

Distance education or distance learning is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via post. Today it involves online education. Courses that are conducted are either hybrid, blended or 100% distance learning. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent developments in distance education. A number of other terms (distributed learning, e-learning, online learning, etc.) are used roughly synonymously with distance education.

Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn’t just train the mind; it is a social and moral development too. Education is about the cultivation of the inner life, that is, of the human soul, the human mind and the human person; or, to be more precise, the person’s humanity. Education is about information and knowledge as much as it is about ‘self-formation.’ Education is not just delivery of ‘content’ but is equally about the process of ‘delivery.’

E-Learning has stripped the personal from student-teacher relationships, rendering them almost anonymous, even when cordial. Students too have been stripped of singularity, often no longer conducting themselves as students but as customers or clients, and education as shopping. For teachers and students, anonymity may be requested, even required, but to preclude the formation of relationship – especially when requested or advised – seems, well, unprofessional. Despite conceptions of professionalism that strip specificity from teacher- student relationships, it would be easy to assemble anecdotal evidence for the significance of teachers in students’ lives. Regarding the relationship, all that our ethical institutions rely on individual responsibility in different ways, they further contain an expressive dimension – one that touches on courage, generosity, solidarity, among other qualities – inseparable from commitment to public context.

Character is no template to be installed; it is to be threaded through the specificities of relationship, study, and circumstance, including the affective as well as material conditions that prevail at home, school, and society. For youngsters, character becomes constituted within the accumulation of experience; lived and embodied, one that is not virtualised, as while staring at screens.

There is a relationship between character formation, being able to learn from experience, and being open to political and moral argument. Experience becomes educational only when we manage to learn from it. Self-knowledge and self-study become forms of self-management and self-governance within an overall biotechnological framework concerned with optimization of life-resources. Social interactions with the fellow learners and teachers on the school campuses and off campuses create personal and professional associations. Ups and downs in such associations help the formation of ‘self’ through meeting the upheavals in relationships, coping with the trauma of gender and caste and acquisition of dominant social conventions.

Today there is much emphasis on relationalism or relationality. It is irreducible. To appreciate the specificity of relationality just attempt to study the history of your own relationships with school, subjects, ideas and teachers and with your own selves. All of us, you and me, individually are a public on to ourselves, from womb to tomb.

“The classroom is a space in which the personal is magnified, not diminished” said Bryant Keith Alexander in 2005.

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