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What's wrong with the educational system and how to fix it.
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2012 Aug 14, 3:02pm 33,214 views 60 comments
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Rin
2012 Aug 16, 10:19am
1. Nationalization of the education system.
2. Standardization of curriculum.
3. Reduction in the cost of schooling.
4. Standardization of the testing of students.
Actually Dan, the UK federated London University enacted a distance program, during mind you, the height of the British Empire in the mid-19th century ...
http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk
It's still quite popular among the Commonwealth nations and it's got a lot of what you're saying with standardizing curricula, lower costs of schooling, and uniform tests around the globe. administered by the Consulate.
All and all, I think the primary advantage locally is that the US took advantage of online streaming, long before anyone else, but the British set the mold of how such a degree program would look, with worldwide equality. I think what you're hinting at is that this will converge into a system where standardized qualifications will become the norm.
Don't you guys know the education is the privilege only for us rich? If you are poor, you will always be our slave. And we'd like to keep you there, of course. What would be the best way to do it?
1. Keep the cost of education extremely high. We are accomplishing it by cutting the budget for school.
2. Keep the cost of living so high, so you guys wouldn't dream of using your money to educate your kids rather than paying us. Yes, we are accomplishing it by investing into the futures which tend to drive up the price rather than stabilizing the price.
3. For those of you who happened to force your way into our education system, we will slap you with so much debt. When you graduate, you will end up with tons of debt that you have no choice but to become our slaves. You must be taught a lesson. You should know your place.
We don't care our entire education system becomes deteriorated as long as we are well off.
So stop this non-sense of keeping the education affordable for the poor. We need a not too healthy host to leech on. We don't need any competition from the poor.
Dan8267
2012 Aug 16, 11:39am
please read all the way through, and try your hardest to comment on the whole of what I am saying.
I always read the whole post. And just because I respond to specifics, does not mean I miss the overall picture a post paints, if any.
When you imply that the whole of what I am saying is inaccessible to you, because you find fault with some little snippet that is not even relevant to my point, you don't fool anyone.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
But in the case of your previous post there were no arguments.
Anyway, fooling anyone goes against my core philosophy. I always advocate rational thought, transparency, repeatability of experiments, the irrelevancy of the messenger, and confirmation of the fact. Attempts at deception are antithetical to my worldview, and the thought process is more important than the conclusion to me. Understand that, and everything I say makes sense.
I propose that much of your suggested reforms to higher education are based on your experience.
As well as observations of other people's experiences, reports on the effectiveness of education, and years of experience in transferring and representing knowledge.
Had you gone to a four year school and lived there, having the more traditional college experience (no not just the drinking and sex), then you likely would have a different view.
I did go to a four year school and I did live there. I did have the traditional college experience. Therefore, your conclusion is empirically false. The flaw in your thinking is assuming that the only way to reach conclusion C is to start with premise P. In fact, many roads lead to conclusion C.
More importantly, you fail to grasp the worldview of rationalists. As a rationalist, I do not consider my own point of view to be special or important. That includes the fact that I'm human. Even that is irrelevant. I would reach the same conclusions if I were a rational dolphin, extra-terrestrial, or computer. The truth is objective and therefore does not contain opinions. All correct analysis leads to the same set of solutions for a given problem. That is the rationalist philosophy. It's objective, not subjective.
Say in a parallel universe, you are as intelligent as you say and that you got a scholarship to MIT,
I've never made a comment on my intelligent. You concluded that I'm intelligent based on my writings. That compliment came from you, not me. It hardly seems fair to imply arrogance on my part simply because I impressed you without even trying.
Say in a parallel universe, you are as intelligent as you say and that you got a scholarship to MIT, and that you had a lot of fun there , but also were spurred on by the competition and collaboration and stimulation late night conversations with your fellow undergrads.
If were just making things up, then I prefer the parallel universe where I'm banging Scarlett Johansson.
My guess is you might feel different about the value of a traditional college education.
As I did go through a four-year program at a college where I lived on campus, you're conclusion is incorrect. But you are missing the point altogether. My personal feelings about college are irrelevant. The messenger is irrelevant. If I had a raging boner for brick 'n' mortar or "traditional" college as you like to call it, that would make no difference. The facts are that VSS would be far cheaper, more effective, and more socially just than brick 'n' mortar schools. These facts are not even remotely affected by my personal experiences or life history, or yours.
Look, everyuone knows that online education has been growing very quickly.
That's actually not true. Although you can learn anything online, you cannot get an accredited degree without going through a brick 'n' mortar college, and that college is simply expanding to online services to increase its profits.
VSS is way more than just learning things through the Internet. Please go back and read the initial post which details all the things that VSS does differently than the status quo.
VSS isn't the University of Phoenix or your local college offering classes to remote students by video recording lectures.
I don't want to see college replaced by online college.
Perhaps you don't. But the advantages I've shown above include
- ending student debt
- providing universal access to all educational opportunities
- ending the gap in education of ethnic minorities
- freeing students to reach their full potential whether they are high performers or low performers
- getting a degree that actually means something to the profession you enter
These advantages far outweigh your personal preference.
I don't want to see college replaced by online college. And I don't the old fashioned libereral arts education to be something that eventually is only for the leisure class or the children of the 1%.
If you actually believe my proposal does this, then you have absolutely no understanding of my proposal. VSS makes all liberal art courses available to all people in the world. It opens those liberal arts courses for the poorest children, old people, and invalids.
There is noreason that in relative terms a college education, especially at the best state schools shuld cost so much more now than it did 50 years ago.
There is no reason a college level education should cost more than a few pennies. Of course, to make this happen, you must get rid of physical campuses, faculty, and staff. And that means going virtual.
Knowledge is information, and in the Information Age, data is free. Brick 'n' mortar or "traditional" colleges restrict knowledge in the same way that hand-written books chained to a desk restrict literacy. VSS is the printing press for education.
If you are proposing that by having more online education we can prevent the supply/demand situation for traditional college education from getting further out of whack then it makes sense.
What I'm proposing is a system that does the following:
1. Nationalization of the education system.
2. Standardization of curriculum.
3. Reduction in the cost of schooling.
4. Standardization of the testing of students.
5. Socialization of the costs at the federal level
6. Elimination of faculty and all staff.
7. Elimination of physical facilities for schools.
8. Elimination of the profit motive in schooling, particularly in college.
9. Inclusion of industry leaders in skill selection.
10. Decoupling students from one another so that each can progress through the system at his or her own pace.
11. Elimination of state and local control of schooling.
12. Elimination of all tuition and financial aid.
13. Separation of athletics from academics.
But you don't acknowledge other forces at work hewre. In fact you missed the point ogf my link entirely which is why I even copied key text for you.
None of what you said is relevant to VSS vs brick 'n' mortar, but I'll explicitly state why anyway.
The Liberal Arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late fifties into the sixties — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual, and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn’t like the outcome of the 60s? The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation.
1. It is a meaningless statement to say that "Liberal Arts stood at the center of a college education" even during the 1960s. I think a hell of a lot of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students would disagree with you. During the 1950s and 1960s we were fighting the cold war and STEM was emphasized. As a result, man walked on the moon. 'Nuff said.
2. Liberal Arts doesn't cure diseases, end our dependency on non-renewable and destructive fossil fuels, create wealth like the Internet did, or reduce the costs of building shelter. STEM does.
3. VSS does not in any way limit liberal art classes. In fact, all classes including liberal art classes are made more readily available to more people than under the status quo.
4. Under VSS, more students would have greater exposure to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages, and cultures. College X offer a course in traditional Chinese, but not Mayan. College Y may offer a course in Mayan, but not Chinese. VSS offers courses in every language living or dead including Klingon.
The whole point of VSS is that it scales infinitely better than any brick 'n' mortar college can. You're local library may have a few tens of thousands of books. A major library like University of Pennsylvania might have a library with a few hundreds of thousands of books. VSS can have a library with every book every written. 'Nuff said.
5. The hippie movement in the 1960s did not end racism, the Vietnam War, misogyny, misandry, misanthropy, or homophobia. Nor did the hippies stop corporatism. In fact, as soon as those disgusting unwashed hippies entered their 30s and started making money, they voted in Reagan to deregulate everything so they could turn the stock market into a casino.
The greed is good decade of the 1980s was created by those same assholes you are glorifying from the 1960s. Gordon Gecko was a hippie who grew up, cut his hair, and put on a suit just like all other Baby Boomers. When they were young and horny they fucked like crazy -- make love not war my ass -- and when they grew up they sent other people to war and told us if we made love we'd die of AIDS. Now that the Baby Boomers are old, their attitude is fuck every other generation, just make sure we get to milk out social security and Medicare and leave nothing for anyone else.
The Baby Boomers were the most selfish generation ever. The entire world revolved around them during their entire lives. And during their lives, they created the very evils you are denouncing including corporate control of government, illegal wars, torture as acceptable practice, and massive amounts of pollution. The hippies were never noble and should not be glorified. They were just assholes trying to get laid that later became the assholes who turned Wall Street into a casino and destroyed the economy.
Disclosure: I am a member of Generation X, and we are known to be a bit cynical.
6. The colleges in the 1960s did not accomplish any of the things you mentioned. We Generation Xer's started the end of racism and homophobia by simply not adopting it like every previous generation did. The only way to stop the virus of racism and homophobia is to prevent it from entering the next generation. And Gen X did that.
'Nuff said.
7. Every social advance is preceded by an advance in science or technology. The printing press ended the tyrannical reign of the Catholic Church. The railroads brought about the end of slavery. Radio brought the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century. Television made war and racism less attractive. The Internet brought about the Arab Spring.
Scientific and technological advancements generate social justice advancements. VSS would empower the masses by making a real education available to anyone who is willing to put the time and effort into learning. VSS is the printing press of education.
Dan8267
2012 Aug 16, 11:48am
Actually Dan, the UK federated London University enacted a distance program, during mind you, the height of the British Empire in the mid-19th century ...
Yep, I'm not the first to have those ideas.
Standardization is absolutely necessary because we don't live in villages with local economies. We compete globally, like it or not. So we have to learn globally as well.
It makes no sense for the Texas School Board to make decisions on what textbooks will be used by most states. The only thing Texas and a book repository are well-known for is, well, you know.
Ideally, education should be standardize on the international level. The whole of the world's knowledge should be made available through a global VSS. That would kick ass. It would totally erase all the geographic boundaries imposed on knowledge. Of course, are sick world is nowhere near being able to implement that. Hell, the current political system is still fighting WikiLeaks, the greatest thing on the Internet since ever.
I think what you're hinting at is that this will converge into a system where standardized qualifications will become the norm.
One can only hope so. But it won't happen automagically. It will take people fighting and advocating for it.
Dan8267
2012 Aug 16, 11:50am
1... 2... 3...
Yep, that pretty much describes the status quo and why we need to move to VSS.
Dan8267
2012 Aug 16, 1:55pm
Apparently you aren't all that clear on what liberal arts even means. It often includes Math and Science, although usually not Math and science that is directly related to Vocational or professional education
That's bull. Calculus is no liberal art. Math and physics majors aren't liberal arts majors. They are science and engineering majors.
Just because the Liberal Arts schools want to include STEM students to make themselves look better doesn't mean STEM students want to be included as Liberal Arts. We rightfully lack respect for Liberal Arts, its majors, and its faculty.
Online education has matured a fair amount already and is big
The system I'm proposing is way more that what's called online learning today.
I would like to see our government go back to supporting higher education like it used to
The good old days weren't that good. Researching by scrolling through microfiche sucks compared to a Google search. Even when I was doing research the "old fashion" way, I new the future was all digital.
The fact is that eventually learning will be all digital. Either accept that and help shape the future, or fight it and have no influence on the future. Fighting digitization of knowledge is like fighting globalization. It may feel good, but it's pointless and counter-productive.
I'd rather shape the future than pine for the past. Especially since the past sucked ass anyway.
Indiana Jones
2012 Aug 16, 2:58pm
"For any degree, take the five leading companies in that field and compose a standard, national curriculum that reflects the real-world needs of the industry".
My concern with this idea is the "control" aspect. Who is composing this standard, national curriculum? And who gets to update it? Is it our government? Private corporations? This potentially could be a perfect vehicle for propaganda and furthering of an agenda, for example, the general concept of creating slave wage earners for our corporations.
Creating a "definitive" education and eliminating alternatives to this system could be dangerous and limiting to the quest for alternative viewpoints that vary from the mainstream. Only one story/version/DVD of Europe's History, for example?
We Generation Xer's started the end of racism and homophobia by simply not adopting it like every previous generation did. The only way to stop the virus of racism and homophobia is to prevent it from entering the next generation. And Gen X did that.
Gen X will stop none of these things. What you call racism is a natural self defense and survivalist instinct. Homosexuality is a genetic dead end.
Homosexuals and racial minorities have been given media time in the past 2 decades to destroy america and pacify its real citizens under the guise of equality and civil rights.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/8fQoGMtE0EY
I don't know if the Russians are still behind it, but whoever is subverting america into sheep is following their game plan.
I would argue that the real stumbling block would be a Constitutional smell test. It was already established in this case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez
So to prove that education must be provided by the federal government (even if it is just setup costs) is going to be hard.
Rin
2012 Aug 17, 12:26pm
Rin says
Actually Dan, the UK federated London University enacted a distance program, during mind you, the height of the British Empire in the mid-19th century ...
Yep, I'm not the first to have those ideas.
Standardization is absolutely necessary because we don't live in villages with local economies. We compete globally, like it or not. So we have to learn globally as well.
It makes no sense for the Texas School Board to make decisions on what textbooks will be used by most states. The only thing Texas and a book repository are well-known for is, well, you know.
Ideally, education should be standardize on the international level.
Perhaps you don't have to re-invent the wheel here. Another British operation, the Open University, has expanded beyond what London Univ has done, with a much broader audience and in today's digital era. London Univ is still mainly a pen/paper type of place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University_%28UK%29
Maybe what Americans can do is instead of let's say 'fighting the system', make these Rue Britannia programs more popular and accessible here, and then, we don't have to waste time with the whole Univ of Phoenix debacle which made online work, unpopular to locals, to begin with.
And then, Americans can have their cake and eat it. The best exam takers can opt for London School of Economics/UoL online "British Wharton" for name recognition, while everyone else can do their studies at places like Open U, and still have the bachelors degree needed to be 'seen' in corporate America.
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Peter Schiff debates Diana Carew, economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, on whether or not students are better off with college loans.
Are universities unethical?
The video from the article
http://www.youtube.com/embed/NJzBGNQbHwc
Regarding this video there are a couple of points that really should be obvious, but evidently need to be pointed out to Diana Carew and anyone else who thinks she did a good job.
1. Subsidies without price controls always benefits the sellers, not the buyers.
2. Government guaranteed loans increase the price of college and make it unaffordable to many.
3. Throwing money at colleges and schooling is not an investment in education. Education and schooling are not synonymous. Nor are education and degrees.
4. High tuition decreases the availability of college far more than the loans increase it.
5. Education isn't the only path to growth.
6. Education doesn't guarantee growth. There are already many highly educated unemployed people. You need to fix the economy so that there is a demand for educated employees. Merely increasing the supply does not create jobs. It only lowers pay.
7. Under the current system, the taxpayer is only paying if the student defaults which is nearly impossible as these loans are not wiped out even in bankruptcy. The student is still paying under the current system. The student isn't getting a free college degree.
8. If you want to make college "free" and a right, the only way to do it is with price controls on college. Colleges would have to be forced to take in only $5000 per year per student and forced to offer only 4 year or shorter degrees. Only then can you socialize the costs of college.
9. Whether or not you "agree" with reality does not change reality.
10. Diana Carew's points weren't good. They were unfounded opinions with nothing to back them up. Peter Schiff's point were based on the most accepted economic principle, supply and demand, and concur with the history of college tuition over the past 50 years.
Does Diana Carew remind anyone else of the bimbo in the opening scene of Newsroom (2012)? I so wanted to hear Peter Schiff say "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" to her.
By the way, I'm really liking Newsroom. I saw the first eight episodes and totally identify with Will. But I digress...
The real solution to the college bubble is to get rid of college all together. In fact we should get rid of high school, junior high, and elementary school as well. What should we replace them with? Something far better for educating students and developing human capital.
The fact is that studying calculus at MIT is no different than studying calculus in some rinky dinky high school. It's the same subject, the same material. Why does it matter where you learn it, or for that matter in what year? There is no purpose in recreating the same lectures every year when they can be created once and viewed an infinite number of times. Hollywood actors don't re-enact a movie for every audience. The movie is recorded once and distributed digitally worldwide. There is no reason that knowledge, which is inherently digital information, cannot be transmitted in such a way today. We live in the information age. Information is free.
Already you can get a college education for free while sitting naked in your living room. You can take a multitude of courses online for free. Just visit the OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium. Want to learn calculus, quantum mechanics, medieval history, post-romantic literature? All it takes is your time and effort. What it does not take is money.
I work in the software industry and I learn more in one year, every single year, then college students learn in four. It's expected. But it does not cost me money to learn things, even things outside of my profession. The Internet makes knowledge free. Even if colleges and the OCWC didn't offer courses for free, someone on the Internet would offer that knowledge for free. And it only takes one expert willing to share his knowledge. Knowledge is free.
But degrees are not. And degrees are not knowledge or education. Degrees are pieces of paper that are suppose to prove you have knowledge and skills, but no longer do so because colleges are profit-whores who give out degrees to anyone willing to fork over large sums of cash through government guaranteed loans. And that is the problem.
The solution is quite simple. Get rid of colleges. Replace them with a national, standardized virtual institution. No, I'm not talking about a private company like University of Phoenix offering worthless "degrees". I'm talking about a national, non-profit virtual university that can truly educate and verify the knowledge and skills of students, and do so for less than $500 per degree. Yes, a college Bachelor of Science or MBA for under $500, and one that will mean far more than today's degrees. That's what I'm talking about.
How is this possible? There is no need for teachers. Sorry, but they are not necessary and you cannot serve two masters. You cannot look out for the needs of students and the needs of teachers. And I will favor the needs of students.
Also, there is no need for buildings, campuses, sports centers, advertisements, textbooks, and all the other things that (often artificially) drive up the cost of college. Eliminate all these things and the cost of college, that is, the cost of knowledge is essentially zero. The only things needed are a tablet, electricity, and Internet connectivity, which are essentially free. The only thing that will actually cost real dollars is the verification process that ensures the students have mastered their fields. And this cost exists only because of cheating.
So, how do we start?
For any degree, take the five leading companies in that field and compose a standard, national curriculum that reflects the real-world needs of the industry. Update this curriculum every five years. Find the very best authors in the field and pay them each a large one-time sum to write the definitive text in each subject: calculus, classical physics, chemistry, anatomy, etc. Yes, this start up cost is large, but aggregated over the millions of students per year it will serve, it is essentially $0.00 per student.
All texts are stored and transmitted digitally and DMR-free. The educational materials, of course, include not only text, but also videos, simulations, and interactive applications. For example, a course in automotive repair would include an interactive application in which you make automotive repairs in a virtual environment.
Students can pursue the curriculum at their own pace rather than the pace of the college's semester. This will drastically improve academic performance as the better students can more quickly go through the material and the lower performing students won't be left behind. All students can learn asynchronously, preventing bad students from holding back great ones and allowing the bad students to eventually master the material even though it takes them much longer.
When it comes to testing, in order to prevent cheating the system, students will have to go to physical test site, but such sites are way cheaper to run than even elementary schools. Students with satisfactory grades can progress through the curriculum. Any student can choose to revisit a course or parts of a course and retest for better scores even if they already had satisfactory grades. Again, this is far superior to the current system.
Of course, this doesn’t have to apply just to college. The same system can even more easily replace existing high school, jr. high, and elementary school systems as their curriculum is narrower and more standardized already.
Naturally, one can expect a number of objections to the system I'm proposing. Let's go over the more obvious ones and how to address them.
Will this put teachers out of work?
Yes. Teachers are one of the main reasons that schooling is expensive. It is not the responsibility of the educational system to provide teaching jobs. It is the responsibility of the educational system to educate the student and prepare him/her for the real world. You simply cannot serve two masters, and the educational system should serve the student, not the teacher.
Teachers will simply have to be retrained to perform other jobs. It is the responsibility of industry to make the most productive use of the human capital formally used for teaching. Just like when the American population stopped being farmers and started performing other duties.
Furthermore, the knowledge that teachers convey to students isn't of a personal or unique nature. Therefore, we can and should capture the very best knowledge and convey that to all students. To rely on teachers is to give inferior knowledge to every single student because no human teacher has the best knowledge in all situations.
Also, if you truly believe that all students should have equal opportunities in education, then it is imperative that the same knowledge, the best knowledge, is conveyed to all students. Relying on human teachers ensures that some students will be given better knowledge than others simply by having access through luck, money, or geography to better teachers. Just think about how people try to defraud the public school system by going to schools outside of their district and taxing. Think about how people pay much more for a house in a good school district. Virtualization places every student in the same district and is the only way to ensure equality of opportunity including equal access to ethnic minorities. No physical schooling system can do this due to the very nature of a brick-n-mortar establishment. If you want to end racism in education, you have to go virtual and teacherless.
Aren't teachers necessary for answering questions?
No. There is no question that a teacher can answer that Google can't answer at least as well. There are plenty of questions that Google can answer that even good teachers cannot. I know as I frequently stumped the teacher/professor in many courses. I have yet to stump Google.
Furthermore, as Watson proved, natural language barriers are rapidly falling.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/WFR3lOm_xhE
Granted this technology is advanced right now, but that means in ten years it will run on your phone. Oh, and we all know that the engineers behind the scene were adjusting a dial to slow down or speed up Watson's ring in time to make the competition more interesting. Otherwise Watson would have ringed in first 100% of the time he had a high degree of confidence in the answer, which was almost always. Humans are slow with buzzers.
In the rare cases where a question does require human intervention, there are a myriad of technologies to solve that from Wikis to message boards to ask the expert systems. If a student manages to ask a new question -- one that thousands of students haven't asked before -- then the question can be captured, answered, and added to the system so that the next student who asks it or a similar question will get the answer without human intervention.
Do you think that is impossible? Then evidently you haven't been paying attention to your Google searches over the past ten years. When you start typing a question, Google will complete it for you based on what others have asked. Google is frighteningly accurate in this. The fact is, humans aren't very original or unique. This same technology can be applied to answering academic questions. In fact, Google already does that. Today's technology, not tomorrows, is sufficient.
Aren't teachers necessary for discipline?
At the college level, no. At the high school level, they shouldn't be, but if they are, then the parents of the students will have to fulfill that role as they are supposed to.
A good student, one interested in learning, does not require supervision. A bad student in elementary to high school might, but that is the function of parenting, not the school system. If neither the parents nor the student is interested in the student's education, then no system can properly educate that student. Learning is inherently a voluntary activity, and no system can change that.
The best any system can do is to prevent such bad apples from spoiling other students. The voluntary nature of participation in the virtual school system ensures this.
Won't virtual school system isolate students socially?
Have you heard of Facebook? There are a plethora of social media sites and platforms. Socialization is not a problem in the virtual world. Nor is it a problem for today's youths. Finally, a virtual school system does not prevent students from meeting up in the physical world. However, such activities are outside the school system as they should be.
Won't students just pretend to learn or cheat?
Testing centers prevent this. And since testing centers focus on testing and fraud prevention, they are much better at detecting and deterring cheating than any teacher or school could be.
What about hands on experience?
Almost all necessary education can be achieved through virtualization including much of hands on experience. For example, you can build a computer from the gate level up using software rather than hardware. You can fix an automobile or design and build bridges in simulations. Even medical knowledge can be acquired largely through virtual dissection and surgery.
There will be some physical experience required in certain fields like medicine and airline piloting that the virtual school system will not be able to provide directly. However, these physical experiences can be acquired after all virtual courseware is completed. Also, these physical experiences make up only a tiny fraction of the total educational experience. Finally, the physical experience would be outsourced to professional organizations.
As the amount of physical experience is small compared to the whole educational process, this part of education would still be relatively cheap compared to the current system of college. So yes, a medical degree would cost more than $500 since it has this physical component, but it would still cost way less than a medical degree costs today. And by the time a student reaches the point where physical experience is necessary, he has almost completed his degree and has a very high probability of successfully doing so. So once again, this is far superior to the current system.
Wouldn't the cost of setting up a national, virtual elementary to college schooling system be enormous?
The setup costs would be high. But since setup costs are a one-time cost, this does not matter. The maintenance costs would be minimal and the operational costs miniscule.
Let's say it costs $100 billion to set up the system. This is a very high estimate, but let's take the worst-case scenario. Then let's say it costs $1 billion a year to keep curriculum up-to-date. Finally, let's spend another $1 billion a year on infrastructure and operational costs (running servers, IT, fiber optic leases, etc.).
According to the 2010 census, there are 77 million students. For simplicity, let's use this figure as a yearly average.
Using the above data, we can calculate the total cost of the virtual school system and, more importantly, the cost per student. Let's say the virtual school opened in the year 2000. Here's what the cost table looks like.
Granted, these are just crude estimates, but the principle is illustrated. In the long run, the start-up costs don't matter and real education is much more affordable and more available.
The bottom line is that this is the one way to truly reform and improve the educational system. It is the only way to provide equal opportunities to all people regardless of race, ethnicity, geography, or wealth. And it is the best way to maximize the potential of both very good and intelligent students and very bad and slow students. It is the most socially just education system. It is also the most cost effective. Finally, it is the best system for ensuring that students are prepared for the real world.
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