Web-Based Learning: But the Prom Will Not Be Webcast

Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education's woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and unproven pedagogies, believing that anything different must necessarily be good.

By Alan Warhaftig

Educators may be pillars of the community, but their discourse is as mercurial as Paris fashion. Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education's woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and unproven pedagogies, believing that anything different must necessarily be good. Educators' current fascination with technology is a vivid example.

There was a time, not long ago, when advocates of educational technology gushed about the prospect of schoolchildren exchanging e-mails with world-class experts on everything. The idea was exciting, even if these world-class experts were hard-pressed to find time to reply to e-mails from each other, let alone from tens of millions of American schoolchildren. Eventually, that rosy vision receded into the distance.

Today, proponents of technology deride traditional schools as limited by a calendar determined by the requirements of agriculture and a delivery system that mimics factories from the turn of the previous century. From this critique, which rings true with most educators, they leap to the conclusion that these limitations render traditional schools wholly inadequate to prepare students for the information age—as if the future no longer required graduates to read, think, write, and solve problems using mathematics, at least not if they developed these abilities using paper and pencil. This parallels the insistence, by some "new economy" market analysts at the height of the dot-com frenzy, that traditional bases for valuing companies...