By Ben Mullin
You can find books, groceries, garage sales, your future spouse and this paper online.
And if you, like me, failed art your freshman year, you can also purchase an online education. But I don”t recommend it.
The vast majority of you, who are diligent, creative and studious non-failers, will have to take my word for it — failing art is an experience that bears an eerie similarity to a Lewinsky/Wiener political scandal. As soon as the report card arrives, you”re asked all sorts of uncomfortable questions like, “Is it even possible to fail art?” and, “What will your mother say when she sees this?” and, worst of all, “How will you get to college?”
Because today”s ideal undergraduate is a cello-playing, discus-throwing Renaissance youth fluent in eight dialects of Mandarin Chinese, a full year of visual or performing art is required for acceptance to any state-run four-year university. I had to make up my grade somehow, at the risk of getting rejected. My future was on the line.
A solution came when I signed up for an online class through Mendocino College. It was a lightning-fast survey of world music — nine cultures in six weeks. I survived the tests and quizzes by hunting through the full-color textbook for bolded words while listening to the class CD on repeat.
When the course ended, my transcript had a vowel on it and I was eligible for college — but today I can”t remember a single thing we covered in that class.
I realize that my experience is not necessarily a good barometer for all of online education. Learning is a two-way street, and the information from that class took the long way around my brain — in one ear and out the other.
If I did learn anything, it”s that learning is easier in real life, when you drag yourself out of bed, chase the bus two blocks and sit down in a rigid chair with 30 other students.
Shopping, dating, working, chatting with friends — and many other social activities besides — are becoming less and less focused on physical place and more on the activities themselves. It”s more convenient than ever to participate in the above activities.
But education isn”t about convenience. In my experience, real learning involves inconveniencing yourself for hours on end while the guy next door tries to move the walls with his stereo. Much of the alcohol in college towns is purchased at convenience stores, which I submit to you is not an idle coincidence.
You can”t replace a brick-and-mortar school with a virtual one. For better or worse, public school feeds, clothes, counsels and keeps an eye on the world”s youth while their parents go to work.
Public school imposed important discipline on me that seldom lasted through June. America could save billions of dollars if it stopped constructing, maintaining and staffing physical schools, but it would lose one of its last universal communities.
Ben Mullin is a Lake County native and an English/journalism student attending California State University, Chico. He will spend his summer as a contributor to the Record-Bee.
