Leah Libresco, an editorial assistant at The American Thinker takes a look at the evolution of education in an increasingly online world.

A glut of Ph.D.s and endlessly rising college tuition prompted Hollis Robbins to wonder in the Chronicle of Higher Education if we should revive the tradition of the private tutor at the post-secondary level.

…If Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) like those offered by Udacity and Coursera assume that education is primarily a question of transferring skills, which can be learned and practiced with or without personal supervision, the latter-day Septimus Hodges envisioned by Robbins reinfuse the idea of apprenticeship to education.

…Many college classes feel like they could be eclipsed by MOOCs because they’re taught at such a remove from the teacher’s own experience of their discipline that apprenticeship is impossible. Apprenticeship is more common in the last two years of college and graduate school, when students have worked through the introductory material in their hundred person lectures and move on to seminars with professors. Robbins’s reform would be intended to bridge this gap (he imagines that after one or two years with a tutor, students would join normal universities as transfer students).

But, although tutors would restore an intimate, vertical relationship between teacher and student, small groups or solo learning might interfere with the lateral relationships between students on campus. Students hold their own symposia in dormitories (albeit with 3am pizza substituted for watered wine and flute girls). Digesting material through the lens of conversation and debate with peers helps promote digestion of material and a more freewheeling exploration of the reading that may be possible while on the clock with a tutor.

While lessons with a tutor are hierarchical, conversations with classmates have the potential for fruitful disruption, as the students review and reevaluate the material together and bring their questions and concerns back to the professor and the traditional academic discussion. A small, private seminar may need to deliberately cultivate this dynamic, since the social traditions and weak ties of a campus will be absent. The solution to a new problem can wind up disrupting the fix to an old one.

The disruptive reforms of MOOCs and tutors are forcing us to reevaluate our expectations about education. As innovators try to unbundle the different goals of college, we have a chance to find better, cheaper solutions, but we also may wind up strengthening traditional institutes of learning, once the debate has helped us disambiguate what we desire for our children besides “a diploma.”