Online Courses' Role in the Fight to Take Back Education

I’ve long said that the most important task facing us is to take back the culture, and that includes not letting the schools indoctrinate our children in opinions antithetical to our own. We might have to go around it the sneaky and round about way, to get around the NEA, but the routes are starting to appear.

It is my theory that Education is about to undergo as much catastrophic change as publishing is writhing under.

Be prepared and make the most of it.

From the American Spectator:

Two models dominate American higher education, and both are broken. The first is the hugely expensive bricks-and-mortar university, which drives parents to take out second mortgages to pay for their child’s tuition and which, without teaching him anything much of value, indoctrinates him in a sloppy anti-religious leftism. The second are the conventional, asynchronous (not real-time) online programs being adopted by many of these same institutions as a means of reducing costs.

While asynchronous courses are less expensive, they don’t include the crucially important real-time exchange of ideas. What’s also missing are the opportunities for informal discussion, pre- and post-class, so important not only to the learning process but also to the ability to share ideas with fellow students.

The first model has serious problems, which the second model can’t fix without creating those of its own. This leaves us with a tremendous hole in higher education, a hole that LibertasU proposes to fill with online courses given in the classical tradition, with a real-time exchange and debate of ideas, and with ample opportunity for informal discussion.

Unlike a bricks-and-mortar school, LibertasU exists exclusively on the web, which means it eliminates all the costs of operating a standard, physical campus, to say nothing of the enormous waste on administrative expenses. This translates into lower tuition and also provides students, no matter what their age or where they are, the opportunity to study with first-rate educators who, themselves, can be located anywhere in the world.

Teachers and students are present at the same time in scheduled classes which are held in immersive virtual reality environments…..

I wish them well, I know first hand this type of setup works. Six years ago, while homeschooling one of my sons, I found a similar environment in The Lukeion Project. Later both the non-homeschooled child and I took some classes there.  If your child is at all interested in classics, give it a try — learning without indoctrination.

And if you’re not ready to go back to college, or if you have children in public schools who will not get (decent) instruction on American history I can recommend a form of asynchronous instruction — my current listen-to while walking is Brotherhood of the Revolution, recommended by one of my fans, and very worth your time or your children’s listening-to.