C l a s s  L e c t u r e s

Fortunately, there are none!

Why do students need to sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture in order to learn?

The answer is, they don't.

Before the advent of video, recording devices, and the internet, classroom lectures were the primary way of explaining information.  That day is long gone.

Why should a traditional professor spend 30 years repeating the same lectures over and over again to new groups of students year after year?  Or, better yet, why should students sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture that can be delivered by watching an online video presentation?

Each lecture can now be video taped or recorded ONCE, and then replayed by individual students at their own convenience.

So why do traditional educational institutions still compel attendance at   lectures?  We don't like change!

Rather than lecturing, professors and students could be spending their time in study and learning, then meeting with their professors, if needed, for any explanations that may be necessary.

Learning may be validated by writing papers and giving presentations which may be arranged individually or in small groups of students for discussion.

The present paradigm of learning is totally outmoded and yet functionaries of the current system will fight to the death to preserve it, their incomes and leisure.

In other words, because of the plethora of educational resources, materials, and books available through the internet, traditional educational institutions with buildings and ivy are totally unneeded and wasteful.

Traditional schools have begun to join the bandwagon for distance learning, albeit reluctantly. They don't want to change, they are threatened by new ways of thinking and new ways of learning that are really not new at all.

It's time for students, their parents, and adult students to say no to this insanity and seek out institutions which utilize current technology and practices that focus on student learning not the maintenance of an educational bureaucracy.

Abraham Lincoln said it best when writing to a young many who wanted to be a lawyer:

"Get the books and read and study them in their every feature, and that is the main thing. It is no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading.  I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people in it. The books and your capacity for understanding them are just the same in all places. (...)  Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing."

We agree with Abraham Lincoln! Students matter, not institutions!

We need to get over this country club mentality about colleges and universities that has prevailed for the last 150 years and change the system to meet the needs of modernity.

If traditional schools would adopt current technology and use common sense and eliminate all of the fat in the system, tuition would be a fraction of what it is today. However, the existence of tax payer money keeps prices higher than they would be otherwise.

Traditional colleges and universities have no incentive to reduce costs or to provide better educational systems for students.