What If? Public Education was "replaced" en masse with Online Education/Homeschooling/Trade School

CarlManvers2019

CarlManvers2019

Writers Blocked Douchebag
In this theoretical situation, the Departments of Education across the world have to deal with majority of both parents and children and recent-adults choosing to make use of any and all of the three for learning purposes and leaving their institutions

Yes, it may not all be standardized or have the "discipline" school provides, but people can still learn to varying degrees

The majority of people choose this "cheaper" alternative for varying reasons such as not trusting teachers, thinking their kids could get bullied and not even allowed to fight back, school expenses being too high, long distance, thinking it's not safe at school or on the way, a desire for their kids to learn as much as possible ahead of time, being afraid of viral outbreaks etc

If this all occurs mid-emergency like with COVID-19 for a few months, well for a comparison, I think Western Theaters will have a hard time getting folks back in as they're too used to just watching NETFLIX, so same idea here

Course Trade School isn't at your home
 
One side-effect of the Covid outbreak that is in-line with this What-If is the rise of online education. Universities have to choose between students not paying for classes or attending online, so they go online. The Left may dominate academia but the indoctrination is spread through a mix of peer pressure and role-modeling that can't really work with online courses. The campus culture that they've spend half a century carefully cultivating to aid in the the socialization of freshmen would also become meaningless, can't have micro-aggressions when people just stay home all day and don't interact.

The impediment to online schooling before was mainly a mix of prestige issues and brick-and-mortar propaganda. With the traditional universities using it both those issues have started to be removed, meaning that a lot of students that would have gone to a physical university before will now likely prefer to take the cheaper online option instead.
 
While online can work pretty well at higher levels, there'd definitely be problems with elementary kids learning. I guess homeschool could help here, but would definitely require a lot more effort from parents staying at home (ideally non-working, but working from home would just make this even harder).

For higher level things, trade school could conceivably be a reasonable replacement for most things, but research universities do exist for a reason. As a current CS masters student, what I do now can be done online, but during my undergrad I was involved with ECE research requiring access to far more complicated and expensive machinery. I guess actual research could be done more commercially, but it'd be rather hard to do things like a thesis.
 
Yinko said:
The impediment to online schooling before was mainly a mix of prestige issues and brick-and-mortar propaganda. With the traditional universities using it both those issues have started to be removed, meaning that a lot of students that would have gone to a physical university before will now likely prefer to take the cheaper online option instead.
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I think there are kids who actually DO go to college for indoctrination, that's why they pick non-STEM Courses

And their parents don't care or are indoctrinated as well and/or just want the diploma
 
CarlManvers2019 said:
I think there are kids who actually DO go to college for indoctrination, that's why they pick non-STEM Courses
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Not all of those who want artistic degrees are like that. Some are just artistic types that think that a degree in it will somehow help. One guy I knew had gotten his masters in philosophy, he was extremely conservative though and came from a family that had never had anyone go to university before, so he just legitimately didn't know that it was a dead-end till he graduated, and none of his profs bothered to tell him.

Of course, then you get into things like gender studies... At that point, it's not even indoctrination, it's a master-class.
 
Yinko said:
Not all of those who want artistic degrees are like that. Some are just artistic types that think that a degree in it will somehow help. One guy I knew had gotten his masters in philosophy, he was extremely conservative though and came from a family that had never had anyone go to university before, so he just legitimately didn't know that it was a dead-end till he graduated, and none of his profs bothered to tell him.

Of course, then you get into things like gender studies... At that point, it's not even indoctrination, it's a master-class.
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Yup, definitely the latter are crazy, though I admit I once attended some Women/Gender Studies class

Our teacher weirdly enough admitted how horrible places like the Middle East were and how badly men have it as society expects them to take the load.....she then said feminism was the solution to the horrible pressures on men

At least she admitted that Feminism, as in Western Feminism was mostly about/for white women and that they don't really make use of it on places that actually have women truly being oppressed
 
My brother took a sociology class for an easy A last semester. One thing I remember him being told was "The big debate in sociology is whether it should be an activist science," or something like that; can't remember the exact words now. Roughly, they can't decide if the purpose of sociology should be activism or science.
 
Jarow said:
My brother took a sociology class for an easy A last semester. One thing I remember him being told was "The big debate in sociology is whether it should be an activist science," or something like that; can't remember the exact words now. Roughly, they can't decide if the purpose of sociology should be activism or science.
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This doesn't surprise me at all. As far as I know, socialism has never been about honest research and discovery, it's always been a vehicle for propping up ideologies. When people talk shit about the social sciences, sociology is pretty much the biggest target.

I would suspect that a shift towards online education would make a lot of those types of classes really hard to fill. Without some prof or his students selling the class there'd be little reason to sign up. Most online degrees also have really strict class schedules, so "Easy A's" are less of a thing.
 
Lanmandragon said:
Remeber when the commies reeeeee about putting thier "classes" online due to Corona? The pushback against online colleges by the left will be epic.
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Yup it will

That said, can online classes be "more advanced" than regular schooling? As in, teach kids economics REALLY early?
 
Lanmandragon said:
You have to build legitimate economies for your empire.
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CarlManvers2019 said:
I don't think even Stellaris does that
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No but they generally teach you that wealth has got to come from somewhere.
It's like that half-joking observation, that I don't remember the source for: In many Western European countries nowadays regarding Economic Policy the Communist Parties are only the 2nd worst option after the Greens. Because Communists at least acknowledge that in order to redistribute wealth, you need to actually produce stuff, create wealth, grow crops, etc etc whereas the Greens seem to think you can shut down most of those things without a noticeable effect on living standards beyond curtailing "excess consumerism".
So any game that teaches you about the need to have an economy in the first place is a good thing, even if it lacks the complex mechanics of the Victoria games.
 
If my son is any indication ( I'm sure he's not alone) I can see lots of students opting for online courses. He prefers them simply due to not having to put up with college life bullshit.
 
Wilykit said:
If my son is any indication ( I'm sure he's not alone) I can see lots of students opting for online courses. He prefers them simply due to not having to put up with college life bullshit.
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I really wonder what sort of mindset is needed to actually not get bored with both school and college life when it’s both full of tedious homework and attempts at indoctrination
 
As the COVID crisis has put many ideas about online education into practical experiments at breakneck rate and mass scale, one fairly predictable issue came out - a disturbingly large part of the value of in-person presence of students and teachers in one room isn't the often brought up point of "being able to ask the teacher to explain", from personal experience its hardly popular in classrooms even on a good day, but mundane and a bit disappointing (about the state of culture and society) fact that its making the people involved pay at least some attention - even in university and most disturbingly, not just mere students but also doctoral researchers. And of course this problem is a whole order of magnitude worse at lower grades, in mandatory education with not so adult students. Plenty of samples of the issues cruise around the social media - students trolling, playing videogames or generally not giving a damn about the "online education" in other more and less creative and hilarious ways.

Depending on the choice of sample with these, seems like between 30% to 90% (with more "troublesome" and low achieving populations) of a teacher's job in a classroom is actually making sure that the students at least pretend to be doing what they are supposed to be doing and not doing things which they aren't supposed to be doing; as the teacher's capability to perform this role is severely reduced in online courses, it shows in results and common complaints by teachers and parents (and the complaining is plentiful).
 
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