Distance education circa 360 B.C.*
Gary Klass
Illinois State University
gmklass@ilstu.edu
There's nothing new about the concept of distance learning per se. Students have always studied and learned things in places geographically separated from their professors. And professors have always provided the means for them to do so, even as they warned that this is not the best way to go about acquiring an education. The technology that made this possible was the written word. The first significant use of the new technology to make course materials available to students came with the Plato's publication of the Socrates' Dialogues. Ironically it is in the Dialogues that we find the first murmurs of the faculty "rear-guard action to try to slow down or stop the inevitable."
In Pheadrus, Plato's Socrates challenges the new technology head on, questioning whether the mythical discovery of the written word served any useful purpose[1]. Socrates describes the demon Theuth presenting the King of all Egypt with the arts of calculation, geometry, astronomy, games of dice, and the written word. Theuth argues the merits of each of the arts, asking that they be given out to all Egyptians. The written word, Theuth claims, would "make Egyptians wiser and provide them with better memory". The King demurs, insisting that that just the opposite will follow:
"this will provide forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it…. You have found a drug not for memory but for reminding. You are supplying the opinion of wisdom to students, not truth. For you'll see that, having become hearers of much without teaching, they will seem to be sensible judges in much, while being for the most part senseless, and hard to be with, since they've become wise in their own opinions instead of wise"[2]
In the end, Socrates acknowledges that writing does serve some useful functions in poetry, speech writing and the writing of laws, but, he insists, it is not the medium for instruction and for those who seek the truth through philosophy. There is much irony here. What Socrates says is entirely consistent with his own approach to teaching. But why does Plato have Socrates say these things? We can only speculate. Surely Plato believed that his own writings served some useful instructional purpose. Consider that Plato has three interests at stake: he is a writer, a teacher, and the chief executive officer of the Academy. Perhaps at a time well into his own teaching career (Phaedrus is one of the middle dialogues), Plato came to realize how his own writing undermined subverted his roles as teacher and administrator. Maybe students were cutting his classes, depending on the lecture notes Plato had written to make for what they missed. After all, why should a student attend the Academy when the best teachings are already written down?
Plato's dilemma is mirrored in the most recent controversies arising from the publication of students' lecture notes on Internet websites[3] and Socrates' critique of the written word parallels that of those who contend students will learn less from their on-line notes than by attending their classes.[4] Thus, Mathieu Deflem argues:
Online notes companies may have many negative effects, especially because students could be led to think that they no longer have to attend class when lecture notes are available online. More broadly, the availability of online notes could imply that students would develop a short-sighted and narrow perspective that views of education as just getting the notes to make the grade.[5]
In the case of on-line lecture notes, whether or not faculty lectures are protected by copyright comes down, in part to a question of whether or not lectures are presented in a "fixed" medium of expression, or as mere oral expression is customarily treated, in an unfixed medium. Deflem argues for copyright protection of on-line lecture notes based on the idea that although lectures are oral in nature, their content is in some ways "fixed":
"[L]ectures in educational settings, especially those conducted by qualified instructors at accredited institutes of higher learning, are never oral expressions as such but are always prepared and delivered in a very specific form with various accompanying materials, such as written notes from which teachers lecture orally, images and sound recordings that accompany the lecture, maps and lesson plans, and textbooks and other scholarly writings on which lectures are based.[6]
How Deflem would have applied his point to contest Plato's breach of Socrates' copyright is not clear, the instructor not having taught at an accredited institution and for the most part without "various accompanying materials". But the distinction between unfixed oral expression and the fixed written word was central to Socrates' critique of writing. The primary fault Socrates finds in the written word, and what distinguishes it from good teaching practice, is that it is fixed – its says the same thing to all who read it. The best learning Socrates was arguing, came not from a fixed presentation but from an interactive and dynamic dialogue.
Many of the predictions that the Internet will bring wholesale change to higher education fail to describe just how digital distance education will differ from the distance education that has been available to students through the printed medium for the past two millennium. Libraries and bookstores are full of books that offer to teach readers the same material faculty present in their classes and professors have always found some useful roles to perform despite this. They also fail to consider just what kind of teaching the Internet is most likely to replace.
excerpted from: "Plato as Distance Education Pioneer: Status and Quality Threats of Internet Education," First Monday, 5(7)
[1] Phaedrus, 274c-276
[2] 274e
[3] Florence Olsen. "Colleges Weigh Legal Action Against Web Sites That Publish Lecture Notes," The Chronicle of Higher Education November 26, 1999, p. 69.
[4] Jacques Steinberg, “Free College Notes on Web: Aid to Learning, or Laziness?” The New York Times, September 9, 1999, p. A1. For a discussion of the on-line notes, view the "Opinions on Versity.com" discussion thread for PSRT-L, The Political Science Research and Teaching List, September 18-22, 1999, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/logs/logs.cgi?list=PSRT-L
[5] Mathieu Deflem, "The Educational Costs of Free On-Line Lecture Notes," The Stanford Review Vol. XXXII (2) (October 18, 1999) http://www.stanford.edu/group/sreview/Archive/XXIIIno2/opinion.html
[6] Mathieu Deflem, "Teaching Laws: The Legal Protection of Education and Its Relevance for Online Notes Companies" manuscript, October 26, 1999. (Last revisions added February 8, 2000) http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/soc/mdeflem/zteachlaw.htm
last modified on
01/11/2002