I have come to be educated in a world that has placed an even higher value on education these days that technology has been transformed into a driving force behind the educational development of the students. While computers used to be only for producing well-typed and formatted papers, it has now become a part of the educational system with professors and students alike using the information superhighway in order to get ahead and effectively disseminate information within classes as well.
However, due to the fact that classes can now be attended by students regardless of their physical location, there has been a steadily increasing decline in face-to-face classes that prove to oftentimes become the student’s undoing. You see, while the students do learn their lessons and can get in touch with their professors at the drop of a hat, the lesson in social graces and its traditions, as well as learning the art of socializing, has come to be lost. Two very important facets of indirect education serve a very real purpose in human life. After all, we cannot be facing a computer monitor all the time and exchanging private messages and the like.
Before the internet, email, and messenger services took over the college student’s life, the problem of the professor’s was that the students barely attended classes because they partied all the time. These days though, the students have found the perfect vehicle that allows them to party, study, and talk to other people all at the same time without ever having to leave the confines of their rooms. Although physically safer, it has also desensitized the students towards learning about other’s feelings and how to behave in public. They have a new sense of what defines a community that, unfortunately, will not bode well for their future actual human interactions. Now the problem of the educators has become, according to Professor James Banning, an environmental psychologist from the Colorado State University:
… they’re in their rooms. How can we ever build a sense of community in this building if they don’t come out?”
We have to admit that person-to-person socialization skills are necessary lessons in the development of a person. Physical meetings help teach the students how to discern relationships, how to handle various personalities, and how to manage their student life with their social life. The internet connectivity of students has changed that dynamic of education and instead makes the students believe that they can do everything all at once by multitasking. In effect, a student is connected to the virtual world but totally disconnected from the real world and is oftentimes unable to handle himself in real-life situations because of the lack of training and education in this aspect.
According to former Harvard University researched Clifford Stoll, the bedrooms of dormitories have become an experimental part of education these days:
We’re turning colleges into a cubicle-directed electronic experience and denying the importance of learning to work closely with other students and professors and developing social adeptness.
Such is the reality faced by the educational system these days. Unless a proper balance between virtual and real education and socialization can be achieved, we will have produced a generation of students who can only function well in a virtual world, having learned nothing about how to function amongst other people in real life and that can never be a good thing for the learning evolution of mankind.