ANDREW KEEN writes in The Sunday Times (June 15, 2015) on E-learning, which Indian universities are promoting as the latest and best. It turns out that Silicon Valley IT bigwigs, all frantically developing the perfect software that can finally eliminate human teachers, (a goal being promoted enthusiastically by the Indian system through Massive Online Open Courses MOOC), are themselves sending their children to ‘Waldorf Schools’, in which computers, tablets and smartphones are banned (yes, indeed, BANNED), because, says the Media and Technology Philosophy Statement of Waldorf School:

Waldorf educators believe it is far more important for students to interact with one another and their teachers, and work with real materials than to interface with electronic media or technology.

Oh my. Are they taking us back to the Dark Ages, as Indian teachers want us to?

Or (Heavy Irony Warning) – do children need ‘traditional’ education with human teachers and human interaction, so that they can develop the creative skills necessary to develop the software that can eliminate humans? 

And of course, it will inevitably be e-education for the masses, and increasingly expensive “traditional education” for the elites. As Keen puts it:

It is yet another irony that, over in California, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula says it provides a “Renaissance education in Silicon Valley”. While an online humanities-lite education is good enough for the masses, the children of successful venture capitalists and digital entrepreneurs are being educated in an unambiguously low-tech environment dominated by the physical relationship between teacher and student and a body of core knowledge that stretches back for hundreds of years.

Keen quotes William Deresiewicz:

Moocs, Deresiewicz argues, are “about reinforcing existing hierarchies and monetising institutional prestige. The kids at Harvard get to interact with their professors. The kids at San Jose State get to watch the kids at Harvard interact with their professors.”

Full article by Andrew Keen starts here:

Online learning is yet to take off in Britain as it has in America, where the market research firm Global Industry Analysts estimates that revenue for the online learning sector will reach more than $100bn (Pounds 64bn) this year.

But if on-line education really is the future, why are so many IT moguls choosing traditional schooling for their own children?

Among the rich and powerful families of Silicon Valley, the new-new thing is to give their children a “Waldorf” education that outlaws computers, tablets and smartphones.

“Waldorf educators believe it is far more important for students to interact with one another and their teachers, and work with real materials than to interface with electronic media or technology,” says the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, part of a private chain that has two highly popular campuses in the valley.

In its “media and technology philosophy” statement, the school adds: “Current studies reveal that the pervasive use of computers in the classroom is having a negative impact on key aspects of children’s learning.”

Ironic then, isn’t it, that the new-new thing among Silicon Valley start-ups is digital education? Billions of dollars are swirling through companies that seek to make fortunes by usurping precisely the traditional education that Waldorf encourages.

Reinventing education appears a no-brainer. Indeed, it’s one of the few things everyone agrees on. After all, improving, perhaps even radically disrupting, a somewhat archaic education system seems to be the key to solving some of our most pressing economic and social problems.

What we all want, from a reinvented educational sector, is more of the four Es: equality, employment, efficiency and enlightenment.

Better education could be an effective way to ameliorate crime and social alienation. Improved education can help confront the gap between rich and poor. Above all, reinvented education is the answer to the great disruption of today’s digital revolution, with its challenge of creating viable jobs in an increasingly automated 21stcentury economy.

But that’s about as far as the consensus about educational disruption goes. While most of us, particularly professional educators and parents, believe that the reinvention of education involves more investment in high-quality teachers and schools, and a modernisation of curriculum, the view from Silicon Valley businesses is quite different.

In Silicon Valley, technology — particularly the always-on, opensourced, digital technology of the internet revolution — is seen as the answer. Traditional education and teachers, at both the school and university level, are viewed as the next set of 20th-century institutions to be swept away by the third wave of the digital tsunami.

The problem is that educational “disruption” in Silicon Valley might actually spell educational “destruction” for the rest of us.

The internet — or at least today’s disruptive ecosystem of most forprofit educational start-ups in Silicon Valley — isn’t really the answer to our educational crisis. Rather than promoting the four Es, today’s digital revolution is more likely to compound inequality, unemployment, ignorance and inefficiency. The internet economy has gone through three revolutionary waves. The first, between 1985 and 2000, involved the building of the internet’s infrastructure by companies such as AOL, Yahoo and Netscape. The second, beginning after the dotcom crash in 2000, was the “Web 2.0” period of big data platforms such as Google, Facebook and YouTube. And the third, current wave is the integration of the digital revolution into most mainstream sectors of the economy — from healthcare, transportation, finance and government to school, university and corporate education. More than any other sector, it’s the disruption of the education market that captures both the opportunities and dangers of this all-important third phase of the internet revolution.

Online learning is yet to take off in Britain as it has in America, where the market research firm Global Industry Analysts estimates that revenue for the online learning sector will reach more than $100bn (Pounds 64bn) this year.

These numbers have triggered an investment frenzy fomented by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. At least two online learning companies have joined the much-vaunted club of “unicorns” — private tech start-ups with valuations of more than $1bn.

One of the most hyped is Coursera, founded with great fanfare in 2012 by Daphne Koller, a former professor of computer science at Stanford University — the scientific powerhouse that gave rise to Silicon Valley.

Coursera, which employs 180 people, is a pioneer of massive open online courses (Moocs), the online learning offerings that can attract up to 100,000 students per course. It has 121 university partners offering about 1,000 free online audio and video courses, such as Stanford’s popular “machine learning”.

Koller’s goal is to make the educational experience like “turning the tap — and great education comes out for everybody”. That hasn’t happened, however. Instead, history is repeating itself.

In the first two waves of the internet revolution, we were told by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that media content would magically come out of the network for everyone’s benefit. The outcome was anything but beneficial for anyone except the increasingly monopolistic platforms that owned and operated this content.

We’ve seen the global revenues of the world’s recorded music industry cut by 50% since 1999, the redundancy of tens of thousands of newspaper journalists and a continuing crisis for many other creative professionals in photography, animation and videography. That lesson remains valid. Online learning companies embraced “free” content as if it were some sort of badge of honour to give this scarce material away.

Yet even Koller recognised the risks for universities. “You’re asking a university to take a thing that’s made them who they are, which is their content, their professors, their brand,” she has acknowledged, “and give it to everyone around the world for free.”

The economics of giving away valuable content are self-evidently absurd. Both Coursera and Udacity — another prominent education start-up, the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, a former Google executive and a robotics wunderkind — have recently moved away from free content.

They have been either trying to “monetise” academic courses by charging between $50 and $100 for certificates of completion or shifting to the more lucrative corporate educational market. But it’s still not really clear how these companies — and the remaining high-profile free-content networks such as the Khan Academy — will generate the kind of income to transform them into lucrative businesses.

Koller offers a clue to the longterm business model. Eventually, she told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, “we’ll have data from hundreds of thousands, millions of people at a level that’s unprecedented. I think we’re at the cusp of a revolution of treating human learning as a science.”

It’s probably no coincidence that so many former Google executives are leading the online education revolution. Google continues to generate many billions of dollars of advertising revenue through the mining of its users’ data.

This conjures up the ominous spectre of the internet transforming the “analogue” school into a digital panopticon. Are schoolchildren going to be subjected to Googlestyle surveillance in their education? Who wants to be bombarded with personalised advertisements while taking “free” online courses? Should our digital “university”, with its all-knowing algorithm, become familiar with our most intimate online behaviour? Superstar academics such as the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel and the Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier have attracted huge audiences for their Moocs. This has had unpredicted consequences.

San Jose State University — just down the road from Silicon Valley — decided not to include material from Sandel in its online courses to protect its own, less well-known teachers. Even more tellingly, Duneier himself cut his ties with Coursera, because he feared it was undermining public higher educa-tion and jeopardising the jobs of less well-known lecturers.

The point is that Silicon Valley’s seductive promise that online learning democratises education is illusory. Online education isn’t going to put great universities such as Harvard or Oxford out of business. But it is undermining America’s small private colleges. Susan Fitzgerald, of the creditrating agency Moody’s, predicts a “death spiral” of small college closures.

William Deresiewicz — who taught English to “entitled little s****” at Yale before becoming a polemicist about the state of education in America — says Moocs are “not about democratising education. That is just their cover story.” Moocs, Deresiewicz argues, are “about reinforcing existing hierarchies and monetising institutional prestige. The kids at Harvard get to interact with their professors. The kids at San Jose State get to watch the kids at Harvard interact with their professors.”

It also reinforces the temptation to cheat. In the Web 2.0 period, the appearance of peer-to-peer music sharing networks such as Napster resulted in an online kleptocracy that almost destroyed the music industry. The equivalent today on unsupervised peer-to-peer learning platforms is an epidemic of cheating.

This is such a deeply rooted problem that Coursera has introduced technology that identifies its users through their keystrokes, while Iversity, an online German college, uses an invigilator to stop students getting somebody else to take online exams on their behalf.

Even traditional gender and class biases are magnified in the online learning environment. Researchers at Pennsylvania University, who examined 400,000 Coursera students, found the majority were men. “So much for the borderless, gender-blind, class-blind and bankaccount-blind Moocs,” argued the technology writer Jessica McKenzie. “If anything, this shows that Moocs are widening the educational divide, not levelling the playing field.”

Almost all online learning, particularly at the university level, centres on technology courses, with most of the popular classes being on robotics or computer science. Humanities — which are already in crisis in many American universities — are poorly represented in the digital learning revolution.

It is yet another irony that, over in California, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula says it provides a “Renaissance education in Silicon Valley”. While an online humanities-lite education is good enough for the masses, the children of successful venture capitalists and digital entrepreneurs are being educated in an unambiguously low-tech environment dominated by the physical relationship between teacher and student and a body of core knowledge that stretches back for hundreds of years.

Reinventing education isn’t, of course, a no-brainer. The fact that classroom education, with its personal intimacy between teacher and student, has lasted for centuries — and is still sought by parents who can afford it — indicates the folly of the digital disruptors who champion the redemptive educational powers of technology.