There’s a meme going around that online learning is about to destroy the university.

It goes roughly like this:

1. University has always been the best place to learn stuff.

2. But things like Wikipedia and Kindle have dramatically reduced the barriers to learning stuff outside university.

3. Therefore it’s now cheaper and less time-consuming to learn stuff online, and the days of the university are numbered.

In this vein, Matt Yglesias claims that “American universities are headed for a newspaper-style, technologically-induced giant collapse at some point in the not-to-distant future”

And it’s true that people are learning all sorts of stuff online. The Khan Academy is an enormously popular set of lessons in basic maths topics and a platform teachers can use to identify and tackle pupil weaknesses. The Floating University has just been launched, offering access to lectures by Steven Pinker and Joel Cohen. Even Carol Vorderman has a startup offering online maths lessons.

These ventures are wonderful. They’re opening minds to new ideas and topics, lowering the cost of learning, and will likely have all sorts of unforeseen benefits.

But they may be lacking something. Consider this story about how Ernest Gellner tackled Brendan O’Leary’s doctoral thesis.

“He began the viva by warmly congratulating me… Naturally I felt elated. But then he counselled me that he had one minor obligation to perform: he was required (in the manner of Karl Popper) to test whether he could falsify the thesis that I had written for the dissertation. A chill ran down my recently elated spine. He then performed his duty, corrected my errors, and gave me salutary advice on matters philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, historical and sociological. Lastly he presented me with about 20 pages of typed commentary, amounting to an article in response to my efforts. In short, he demonstrated generosity, utterly professional social scientific standards and astounding scholarly range.”

Online learning as communication of knowledge may never offer the challenge of falsification as efficiently as offline learning.

Prof Yglesias’s statement that “A college, or a law school, is basically supposed to be conveying information to people” seems to put unnecessary limits on education.

Schools and universities aren’t village wells

From Cardinal Newman to Michael Oakeshott, people have agreed that universities aren’t just there to communicate facts and then check they’re in your head. You don’t follow a degree course as if you’re gathering water from the village well. Oakeshott says “A university will have ceased to exist when … its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time”¹.

There’s something more to education. For example, Oxford University’s tutorial system is designed to give an important extra dimension to education beyond conveying information to people. A weekly tutorial gathers a small number of undergraduates to discuss and analyse hypotheses, defend them, criticise and attempt to falsify them.

Will Moore describes the tutorial like this: “Its function is not to instruct: it is to set the student the task of expressing his thought articulately, and then to assist him in subjecting his creation to critical examination”. The tutorial system is “a sceptical method, a method that inquires, probes, scrutinises. It is not at its best in ex cathedra authoritative statement, but in criticism, theory, analysis, comparison.”

Short term humiliation for long term confidence

The tutorial system has some of the features of the Socratic system. From the student’s point of view, it can be both immensely frustrating – even humiliating – in the short term, and rewarding in the long term. The tutor is irritatingly unassailable because he or she rarely tenders a position that can be attacked. The burden is mostly on the student.

A fair portion of Plato’s dialogues consists of people getting irritated with Socrates’s constant questions and challenges.

It’s not impossible to replicate some of the effects of this system. Writing can be an internal dialogue if you learn to have a (good) imp on your shoulder constantly asking “is that actually true?” as you write. Reading critically can have a similar effect.

But training that imp independently isn’t necessarily the most efficient path to critical thought. Learning to think just by thinking is a long hard road. It doesn’t quickly reveal to you that other people can be right despite first appearances suggesting that they’re obviously wrong, stubborn and stupid. And it doesn’t teach you to defend and criticise out loud and inter vivos.

Buddhism has its masters. Business has its mentors. Brendan O’Leary had his Ernest Gellner. Does online learning have or need its own equivalent?

1. The Tutorial System (Word document, 560Kb) ^