[Thread] My neighbor believes that online education can replace what professors do, and that this pandemic is salutary in accelerating that change.

My disagreement with him supports why online education will always be inferior to personal instruction in the liberal arts.

His argument is based on a view of education in which knowledge and skills are accumulated sequentially. He believes that online study is more efficient at transferring both of these these.

That may or may not be true. What he didn't understand was that most of what I do as a historian is challenge the assumptions of students. There are three that I challenge consistently.

The first is the deductive method of argument, where history serves as a convenient repository of examples to illustrate a truth already held

The second is assumption that thinking, and therefore behavior, doesn't fundamentally vary across time and space.

The third is the assumption that one's own set of experiences serves as the touchstone of what is rational thought and behavior.

None of these false assumptions are easily challenged in an online model of self-study.

The Socratic method is far more effective.

[End of thread.]