Truly the greatest enemy the online education revolution faces is not the current education system, but the way that people secretly substitute the real system for this mysterious magical perfect system based on the assumption that the stated goals of the current system are actually its result, and compare online against the myth instead of the reality.
Goals aren't results. Compare real to real. The real competition isn't the mythical fantasyland where everybody learns everything perfectly and retains it forever as a result of the gentle teachings of the schoolmarm. The real competition is the system that produces the real people you really run into as you go about your day, doing real things. If online education in its currently very early state even manages to sometimes match the real world, at one-tenth the price or less, you can imagine what another ten or twenty years of refinement is going to produce for the online model.
And in that real comparison, online will definitely not always win today, and will always have weaknesses. Shop class seems unlikely to work well online. (But then, the real school systems shut down those classes 20 years ago....)
This is a spectacularly true comment, and is generalizable across disciplines. I've rewritten it slightly to generalize it....
Truly the greatest enemy the $REFORM_MOVEMENT faces is not the $EXISTING system, but the way that people secretly substitute the real system for this mysterious magical perfect system based on the assumption that the stated goals of the current system are actually its result, and compare online against the myth instead of the reality.
Goals aren't results. Compare real to real. The real competition isn't the mythical fantasyland where everybody learns everything perfectly and retains it forever as a result of the gentle teachings of the schoolmarm. The real competition is the system that produces the real people you really run into as you go about your day, doing real things. If online education in its currently very early state even manages to sometimes match the real world, at one-tenth the price or less, you can imagine what another ten or twenty years of refinement is going to produce for the online model.
And in that real comparison, online will definitely not always win today, and will always have weaknesses. Shop class seems unlikely to work well online. (But then, the real school systems shut down those classes 20 years ago....)