The Reality of Education and the Limits of Going “Virtual”

Dr. Ryan Hanning

At some point in the development of modern education parents and teachers began to accept the puzzling lie that content and its efficient delivery are the sole means of authentic education. Curriculum and instruction became less focused on the communal and reciprocal exchange between teacher and pupil, and more of an algorithm of inputs and outputs that could be tweaked to provide more efficient outcomes. Somewhere along the way, schools began to see the pupil as less of a person and more as a consumer or, even worse, a cog in a complex social machine.  To be clear, content and its efficient delivery are central components of education, but they are not the only ones.  Nor are they independent of a host of other equally important factors and variables that accompany the complex inner workings of the human heart and mind.

Enter March of 2020. A growing pandemic forced schools to close and pivot to various models of remote and virtual learning. More families opted for homeschooling than ever before, and both public and private schools adapted to the abnormality of the new normal. (See A Return to Normalcy, the first article in this series). In this setting, parents, teachers, administrators, educational policy experts and Silicon Valley tech giants, all struggled to evaluate and triage the good and the bad of the remote learning environment. As the dust settled in empty classrooms and messy kitchens turned science labs last Spring, multiple lawsuits were filed on behalf of parents who are rejecting the claim that remote education is an analog to the real thing. In other words, they doubt that education is simply content delivery.

Let us consider all the available evidence and clearly divest ourselves of the lie that education is synonymous with the efficient delivery of content. Try a brief thought experiment. Think for a moment of your favorite teacher (maybe you are lucky and have several). Reflect on what he or she taught you, and why you learned it from them. Chances are, unless you own stock in a cyber education company or are a cyborg, you learned it from them because they A) were a credible witness, B) understood how you learned, C) cared enough to take the time to make sure you actually learned the material, D) piqued your interest in the subject. Likely it was all the above. It is also likely, and perhaps of greater importance  than the subject, that they taught you something about yourself. 

A few years ago I was traveling to a conference in Vancouver and heard a voice say loudly, “Mr. Hanning!” I turned around and saw a former student, of whom I remembered many important details other than her name, standing bright-eyed before me. I had taught this young woman a decade earlier when she was a freshman in college. She gave me a hug (remember when you could do that prior to Covid-19?) and told me that she had learned so much from me. Always curious if students ever listen to my lectures or my rants, I asked her what it was that she learned.  Did she remember the details of Athenian philosophy or the ancient and contemporary literature on virtue that we read in class? Did she know why 1054 was important or who Louis de Bonald was? “You taught me to love learning, and that who I am is more important than what I do for a living,” she said.  I suspended my temporary disbelief to accept in humility that I at least made a difference in one student’s life. I asked her what she ended up majoring in and what transpired in her life. She shared with me a beautiful story of changing her degree to a dual major in teaching and literature with a minor in philosophy, and subsequent graduate school for literature. She was now teaching high-school students. 

“You taught me to love learning, and that who I am is more important than what I do for a living,” she said. I suspended my temporary disbelief to accept in humility that I at least made a difference in one student’s life.

Here is the point: it is likely true that I provided her with a lot of content that helped her in her future classes, and perhaps even a bit of the foundation she needed for graduate studies, but she would have likely not received those things if for some reason, despite my many failings, she had not entrusted me with the ability to teach her. This story could be told by almost any teacher who has had the opportunity to connect with the students they serve. Yes, delivery of content and assessing students’ reception of it is important; much of my academic career has focused on these realities. But it seemed to me in that moment that the foundational aspect of learning is built much more on relationship and the truth of what is being communicated, than on just its efficient delivery.  As I boarded my flight, I reflected on the words of John Henry Newman’s motto, “cor ad cor loquitur” (heart speaks to heart), and on what education is and what it is not.

Education is Corporeal

While it is possible to learn in an asynchronous, isolated, virtual environment, our brains prefer to learn in real-time, with others, and from a flesh-and-blood person. This fact has been proven through multiple cognitive studies, and likely through your own direct experience. We learn better when in contact with the material and with the people teaching it. This fact means that teaching is often terribly inefficient, both in-person and online. It takes time to learn things, and it also takes an act of the will to devote our intellect or at least allow it to engage with and learn the subject.  Because learning involves the will, the act of learning will always require more than just intellectual cognition. 

Although we have certainly learned some things by accident, and others through force, education in a formal setting should not require either. In fact, nearly all virtual and remote education becomes an attempt to overcome the fact that our brains just don’t show up as well when what we are doing is somehow removed from reality, even partially. Our bodies and our presence make a difference to how we engage reality and how we learn. Whether it is math, science, history, or other worthy subjects of study, we come to learn them and believe in their veracity not just by receiving the data but by learning what that data means when applied to our lived experience of reality. Because education is incarnational, real learning involves not just the intellect, but the whole person. This is why Cardinal Newman would say in opposition to the thought of Locke and his contemporaries, “The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.” 

Despite the gross inefficiency of most staff meetings, whether I like to admit it or not, being with other human beings, not just videos of their heads, makes a big difference. Said by a colleague another way, “It ends up wearing pants to a meeting is pretty helpful.” So too, the corporeal reality of education means that being present to others, and to a teacher, helps you be present to what you are learning.

Education is Communal

While life’s most important lessons are learned interiorly, they are not learned in isolation. That is, they are not learned removed from the people, or the context in which they often matter most. The luminaries of modern education — despite their tendency to unmoor education from the good, true and beautiful, preferring practical above meaningful things — never once sought to disconnect learning from the community. In addition to the incarnational nature on which the teacher–pupil dynamic depends, so too does being in a group of people assist the learning process. Not only is there evidence that it helps retention, but it broadens perspective, as the questions and insights of others add context and contour to the learning. While self-motivated learners can often receive and imbibe the content on their own, applying what they have learned often requires interaction with others. This interaction includes the critique and support from their peers, not to mention the fine tuning and affirmation from teachers and mentors. This is especially true in the practical arts and sciences. While I may accept a self-made mathematician or self-taught historian, I don’t prefer either a self-made nor self-taught medical doctor. As the learned Ethiopian asks Phillip while leaving Jerusalem “How can I understand unless someone teaches me?” Even the protagonists of Dostoyevsky novels recognize the importance of the community despite how obtuse or unengaging a particular community might be.

Education is Student Centered

There is much to be said about developmental and cognitive psychology, as well as neurobiology and the way in which our brain receives, acquires, stores and uses data. However, the mechanics of learning and retention are not one-size-fits-all. Perhaps not even a one-size-fits-many. We share many things in common: we all have bodies, and we all have souls — or minds if you prefer the ancient Greek way of seeing things, or hearts if you prefer a more modern sentiment, or to be secular friendly, higher-order consciences. Our physical nature, which allows us to see and perceive as well as contemplate and willfully accept or reject information or stimuli, means that certain aspects of learning are the same for everyone, or at least for most. We take in data from our senses, we consider our own experiences, we weigh the credibility of our teacher, typically all through similar neurological processes particular to how our brains work. Things like temperament, however, particulars of character, innate or learned interests, emotional intelligence, cognitive ability, sensory preferences etc., as well ethnic and cultural traditions and expectations for age, sex etc., all play an important role in how a student as an individual learns. Good teachers can speak to the particulars of the student without abandoning the universals that we all share as humans. 

Good teachers can speak to the particulars of the student without abandoning the universals that we all share as humans.

Student-centered learning has been the focus of the modern educational construct for some time, which is laudable, except that in some cases it ignores anthropology and tends to conflate secondary things and essential things. Because education is incarnational, communal, and highly dependent on the student, it follows that teachers play a central role.

Education Depends a lot On the Teacher

While it is possible to learn ethics from the scoundrel, reading from an illiterate, or music from the tone deaf, it is best to learn from credible witnesses. A good teacher knows his or her stuff and knows how to invite others to receive it. Not as a conman knows his craft, but as a healed person knows the cure. In other words, teachers play a fundamental role as witnesses to that which they teach, and much of the relational element or learning is based on how credible of a witness the teacher is. In 1975, Pope Paul VI reminded his pastors and catechists that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” This is true for every age, but perhaps of greater importance to modern man because we have tacticians and experts much more often than witnesses.

Education is Served by Technology

The relationship of technology and education has always been a balancing act, not just in terms of recent educational policy, but in terms of human interaction with technology since the dawn of formal models of education. Examples of “ed tech” include scrolls of the ancient Near East, codices and wax tablets of the Greco-Roman schools, blanks used by the medieval guilds to assist apprentices in learning their craft, copy books of the cathedral schools, etc. While the contemplative aspects of education rely on the interior of the mind and the relationship between the instructor and student, the discursive aspects of education have often relied on some form of technology, something by which the teacher could demonstrate the task, process, or purpose and by which the student could practice the technical skill or work involved. 

Properly understood, books, pens and paper are all common and powerful forms of educational technology. Over the past forty years, however, the use of technology in education has changed in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways.  Enter today, when most of our nation’s children are participating in “virtual classrooms” and participating in “virtual education” through the use of various forms of communication technology. Children, parents, educators, and technocrats are all equally concerned, albeit for different reasons. Kids miss their friends, their teachers, and the alternative home that we have created and claimed as a universal good for them. Parents miss the economic and practical realities of a robust school system that provides a rhythm to life, and a host of enriching educational, and extracurricular activities. Teachers miss the relationships with their pupils and the dynamic application of pedagogy that comes from being in front of a living, breathing human being. With these simultaneous overlapping and often oppositional realities is it possible to give a sober and honest evaluation of the benefits or shortcomings of virtual education? Probably not. The “what is best for the children” rally cry left the station years ago, but the “why does virtual education flounder” bandwagon is pulling up just a few minutes late.  

What Education in Not

Education, properly speaking, is never virtual. Unless of course we mean virtual in the sense of “almost.” Perhaps this is why so many parents opted to keep their preschoolers and kindergartners home, or to homeschool their older children, or seek out private schools that were continuing to serve students in-person. While there may be good reason and prudence in going remote or online, we must recognize the limitations of a screen, and the broad impact it is having in the lives of students, and disproportionately on the lives of those on the margins of society (See McKinsey Institutes Covid and Learning Loss, December 2020). We must support creative interventions that move beyond seeing education as merely content delivery, and recognize a broader, deeper and richer tradition of education. This means a more honest evaluation of where remote education makes sense, and where it contracepts the learning that ought to be forming the hearts and minds of the students. This means boldly and creatively reshaping remote, online, and virtual education to go beyond efficient content delivery, and moving towards using technology to make learning human and personal. Schools that already have this conviction are taking steps to provide one-on-one instruction, in-person tutoring, and weekly in-person community learning pods, while shifting basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic to in-person, leaving other subjects more conducive to self-study for the online environment.

So, on behalf of the nearly two million second-graders who are sitting in front of a computer screen trying to perfect their reading skills, the parents who are trying to understand just what the social contract of modern U.S. capitalism is, and the heroic teachers whose vocation has been turned on its head, I offer you the following: The problem with virtual education is that it is not education. We cannot expect it to achieve what only another human being can, which is to incarnate that which is being delivered. The screens we stare at serve as a kind of unintentional prophylactic to the real thing. Today’s technology, as impressive and powerful as it is, has limits. And these limits are not served by being ignored. We ought not to expect the geldings to be fruitful, but rather accept what technology cannot replace–not because we have not found the perfect algorithm but because we are not algorithms

Teacher at blackboard
"Blackboard." Watercolor by Winslow Homer. 1877.

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