Online & Classroom Student-Centered Labor-Engaged Education Over the Guru Teacher-Lecturer

I am touting the worldwide-reach online educational institution ALISON (ALISON.com) based in London, UK, which offers certificates of completion on some classes and diplomas on its course programs (diploma, or degree, programs), or courses of study, free of charge; however, its site and learning modules are attended with a disorienting clutter of ads, that can disrupt one's concentration and considerably slow one's learning, but that can be opted out of for a modest fee. I am also touting EdX (edX.org) based in Boston, MA, US, sponsored by Harvard University and MIT, another highly regarded free online higher-educational institution, or service, offering certificates of completion on some of its classes. I’m enrolled in both and began taking courses April 30, 2014, electing for science, math, financial and history classes.

Other reportedly highly regarded online institutions of higher education are Coursera, coursera.org; Khan Academy, khanacademy.org; and Udacity, udacity.com.

Why I post this writing is because we live in a new, constantly changing and technically and technologically evolving economy and society in which, except in elite-knowledge-and-skills technical occupations, employee benefits are being scaled down and eliminated and job security and lifetime employment in the private sector are no longer a commitment on the part of employers in general and are no longer the norm. Workers must be prepared with employment-market in-demand credentialed knowledge and skills to compete for the next nonsubsistence-paying or nonpoverty-wage job, following economy- and company-budget-dictated layoffs — there will always be downturns, busts, recessions, crimped company demand and revenues, and business bankruptcies and failures, in our up-and-down-cycling, in-determinative-dynamics, complex capitalist economy.

(ALISON.com, based in London, UK, is an international online school that offers a broad variety of credentialed science, cyber-tech, tech, business and vocational education programs. Also, an updated education in in-demand knowledge and skills, and the certificates and credentials that go with it, can increase one’s employment value to one’s employer, being one’s retention value, and advance one in occupation and income on the job. ALISON.com offers other certificate courses as well. You can also get from ALISON.com the education you need to go into business for yourself and be securely self employed, while paying into your Social Security retirement insurance and investing in a private or multiple private, tax-privileged retirement plans or funds. The other schools listed above are also outstanding schools, based on the reviews and endorsements of them by reputable media figures and news media, including, in instances, Bill Gates and Google.)

Business is, and, as a direct consequence, employment and layoffs are, driven by the bottom line of the business profit-and-loss statement (P&L), or its equivalent for nonprofit organizations, in which the bottom line reports the net business profit, and profit size, or net business loss, and loss size, for the year, but also quarterly, as relates to company quarterly earnings reports, for internal financial monitoring and decision-making purposes, to a business. If the bottom line is a small profit or a loss number, overhead (which includes staff, usually the most cost-efficient expense to cut) will be strategically cut and lowest performing functions or facilities will be reduced or closed, or be relocated, exported or contracted to minimal-expense locations or contractors, etc. Executives, in most instances, will do all they can to boost the bottom line, in order to satisfy the stockholders (especially large-share-owner, voting stockholders) and board of directors, who in large measure receive dividends and other compensation from the bottom-line profit and profit margin, and whose stock values are significantly based on the P&L bottom line, the stock of which they may trade, in calculated measure (buy low and sell high), ultimately for capital-gain income based on appreciation in the stock value. Executives who fall short in satisfying the stockholders and board of directors, with regard to the profit status of the bottom line of the company’s P&L, will lose bonuses or their jobs.

I’m enthusiastic about online education because it’s generally self-paced and step-by-step, learner-engaged, hands-on, workbook-style education, not largely passive, dependent on lectures and note taking and doing reading at home, where the reading should be done on the job — that is, in the classroom — with learning exercised and tested in workbook exercises. I am an advocate for both online and classroom education in which the student is the primary focus and actor and is thoroughly learning-labor-engaged, with students in classrooms learning primarily from workbooks, paper or digital (computer programs, including of interactive audio-visual learning games and virtual-reality instructional movies of all kinds on all academic subject matter and brain exercises, new, and old, like crossword puzzles and anagrams), with the instructor and teaching assistants (TAs) mainly standing by and being called on by students to answer questions and assist students in getting successfully through their classwork (including individual and group class projects), being their in-class homework. Lectures and whiteboard instruction should be treated as ancillary and supplemental to on-the-job — in-the-classroom, that is — reading and workbook reading and learning exercises and practice.

(Abstracts on studies on the effectiveness of instruction by lecture that I have read consistently report that students retain little memory of the lecture content new to them unless the lecture is followed up by classroom discussion of the lecture content, which tends to modestly increase student memory retention of the lecture content. In either case they report memory of lecture content rapidly fades to a small percentage in retained memory of content within two weeks — findings were obtained from memory tests of, and not self reports from, students. A major problem found accounting for the inefficiency of learning from lectures is that overall student attention focus in lecture instruction tends to wane after 15 minutes into the onset of a lecture, that attention is spotty [attention tuning in and tuning out] throughout the lecture for some students and that general inattention to the lecture is indicated for some students, suggesting that students may not have voluntary control over their informational-oriented or information-extractive, viewer attention spans, in which they are learning-activity disengaged, without a specialized science and pedagogy of attention-span training and development for high-efficacy viewer, audio-visual lecture and lecture-board learning. When students are reading, writing, performing mathematical operations or drawing, sculpturing or constructing or assembling something, or playing a musical instrument, etc., they can return again and again to the point at which they lost attention, became confused or made a mistake and try again to comprehend or understand, or correct or improve themselves, or remember or memorize, without having to interrupt the teacher-lecturer or having the teacher-lecturer repeat the missed or misunderstood lecture information or the lesson on the lecture board, requests made for help to the possible inconvenience, impatience and annoyance of the teacher-lecturer and some advanced students in the class if one or a series of students sequentially need/s a repeat or reiteration [perhaps multiples of this in varied re-phrasings in order for individual students or clusters of students to get a clear understanding] of the lecture information or whiteboard lesson.

I am not asserting that the school or classroom lecture is a worthless instrument of instruction, as it often can be a valuable source of intellectual stimulation, entertainment and inspiration, and is designed to contain valuable academic learning content for student assimilation and intended to deliver it as a matter of course, but too often to modest effect and inconsequentially, for the reasons explicated in the foregoing.  Most of the time it does carry out its central purpose — that is, to instruct, to inform, to teach, to educate — lustrously but with the pervading and enduring critical flaw of reaping an initially modest, then tapering, and finally net low, learning harvest in the short term for its recipient student-learner audience, a flaw that can be remedied by integrating it into a computer software application or e-technology that can make its learning results a high learning yield to student learners. This can be achieved by instructors making home audio-video, or strictly audio, recordings of their lectures on their home computers that they can edit to perfection on their home computers to be classroom, or virtual classroom, ready, and incorporating into them a control-panel software application that provides an on-screen media-player control panel within the video recording, or blank video feed for audio-only recordings, that students can computer-mouse or computer-keyboard click on, or touch-screen tap, to operate, or use a remote-controller to operate, to customize the volume, speed [including slow motion], and playback, and looped-playback, of any part or multiple parts of the lecture. The computer’s desktop-window-loaded or on-screen media-player control panel would have the standard audio or audio-video media player operating functions of play, stop, pause, fast forward, reverse and mute but should also feature a rate-of-speed function [i.e., for a play or playback choice of one percent to one-hundred percent of the original speed of the lecture as recorded by the instructor], a tag function for marking the beginning to end of each portion of the recorded audio-video, or audio, lecture [for making audio-video clips or audio-only clips] the student may want to playback or loop-playback and a function permitting students to direct the media-player control panel to automate conversion of lectures from voice to written text and making voice-to-word-processor typed-text files, based on the software principles of Dragon-Voice-Recognition software for taking speech dictation and converting it to typed-text word-processor files.

The tagged parts of the instructor’s recorded lecture [the parts of special interest to and tagged by the student] could simultaneously be played back as an informationally self-customized audio-video, or audio, lecture presentation for any particular student for his or her self-decided precision education [aggregated and streamed audio-video, or audio, verbatim notes on or of the lecture] and a written document of the same information in the student’s computer word-processor text files — a special word-processor software update needs to come to market that converts written-text word-processor files to voice playback at the click-on request for this by computer owners or users for them to be heard by the computer owners or users.  This software- or e-technology would empower instructors to upload and post their lectures on their personal page, or account, or a specialized, no-cost, public-service audio-video page for educators, with a podcast or webcast internet service provider or on YouTube or Facebook, or other web-place social media, for students to view on their computer tote pads, laptops, computer desktop windows or their cell phones, or for download of lectures onto a student’s computer.

Most importantly, the knowledge-harvest drawbacks of the traditional lecture method of classroom teaching and learning could be overcome in large measure when lectures can be self delivered in customized instructional fashion by students, in which each individual student can set the speed of the lecture presentation to his or her preference or comfort in tempo [attention-perception and memory-work mental-input speed and stamina] as wells as set for playback or looping-playback, via the control panel of the media player, for any number of times and at any choice of speed compatible with the individual’s comfort in following or tracking the lecture, any part of the lecture the individual may want to dwell on and repeat, thereby conforming the audio-video or audio-only lecture to the individual student’s chosen tempo of learning and allowing the individual student to focus in on, at his or her discretion, parts of the lecture the particular individual may need to revisit and carefully and intensively, or drill, review in order to learn them with a full comprehension and lasting memory of their perhaps elusive or initially mentally not-registering learning content being communicated in the lecture.

In brief summary, with this e-technology students could set the media-player software control panel of instructors’ audio-video, or audio-only, recorded lectures — uploaded to the internet for click-on, or the like, streaming — to automatically or systematically fast forward to and slow play or slowly loop-playback the tagged parts, only, of a lecture either online or on the student’s computer for the student’s listening, while simultaneously making word-processor text and audio files on the student’s computer, all of service for significantly enhancing student memory of and significantly increasing student learning yields from instructor lectures. Ideally, students should also have market access to affordable wireless or computer-plug-in audio-video headset goggles, with a handheld media-player remote controller, by which they can listen to and watch on or via their computers the instructors’ audio-video, or audio-only, online lecture recordings, with one or both ears and/or eyes while lying in bed, eating at the dining table, or sipping coffee or tea at a Starbuck’s or Peet’s coffee shop.)

I have no affiliation with either of the above-named institutions other than as a student enrollee. I am touting both institutions because I have examined their sites and been impressed by what I viewed and am a believer in student labor-engaged learning over student learning by instructor lectures and whiteboard instruction, that is followed up with directed home reading and homework assignments, which may not be done or may be problematically and haphazardly done by very many students (who, frustrated, may shun homework in getting stumped on problems and stuck in understanding concepts at home without being able to consult a competent instructor or TA at home for help), with the consequence of politicians and parents blaming the poor or failed student academic performance on the student, often unsupervised, and, by nature, immature and emotionally, mentally and intellectually undisciplined children, and blaming teachers carrying out their tradition-based structured roles of lecture, sermon and lecture-board write and diagram that are not compatible with the learning situation of many students and don’t optimally engage their attention and imprint on their memory-learning process.

Also, evolving and ongoing tweak-improved online education will make higher education affordable to so many young people priced out of and facing debt enslavement by the traditional system, forcing the traditional system, of both public and private schools, to change its ways by doing a significantly better job of educating and in lowering the cost of education, or keeping it affordable and reasonable, at all grade and institutional levels. Voucher private school education, transferring public tax money to private schools to educate public school children opting out of the public school system, will not help the bulk of poorly performing public school students, as not only will the tax-voucher private schools take the taxpayer public’s money but also the already good and best performing and behaving students, from the public schools, from which they can cherry pick admission, rejection and expulsion of students. The further consequence of the aforementioned inevitable consequence of unloading public school funding and academically premium and good-conduct students on voucher private schools will be to worsen the competitive educational profile of public schools, disposing and exposing the public school system overall to harsher criticism and attacks by politicians and parents upon their becoming the largely refractory reservoir of primarily the problematic-learner and bad-behavior student populations, while drawing down (diminishing) the financial and academic-student-body strength of the public schools. What the latter means, in other words, is that the tax-transfer payments and ongoing outgo of and rejection of public school education by otherwise prized public-school-students in preference for and opting for tax-voucher-funded private schools, with admission-screened high-achiever and congenial student populations, would result in a funding and prime-achiever student, at a minimum, decapitalization of public schools, with fixed and increasing facilities operating costs remaining for the public schools even if public schools cut administrative and teaching staff and administrative and teaching-staff costs, commensurate with the loss of academically premium students, inclining whole local public school systems to financial and academic breakdown and insolvency (this situation being the tax-voucher private-school robbery of the financial and student-achiever value of the public schools, resulting in the ruin of public school systems).

Online education should be promptly made available in juvenile detention centers, jails and prisons. It may be a brain changer, for the better, with regard to the individual and society, on the populations in these places.

Free and low-cost online higher education will mean negligible or possibly much-avoided educational debt for most of its graduates and lower pressure on those of them entering the medical, legal, financial and engineering professions — who have taken online-qualified courses integral to their professional campus education — to charge extreme fees for their services, extreme fees they would otherwise need to amortize their otherwise large educational debts.  Such educational debt avoidance would free or unencumber their incomes, early in their adult years, and allow for them to have a comfortable personal and family life, with all of the reasonable amenities and assets that go with these (having and adequately supporting children, having a nice home, furniture, car, clothes and modest jewelry, entertainment, travel, savings, investments, etc.), benefiting the economy broadly, rather than the niche debt industry, and affording them early-in-life good financial grounding and peace of mind.

(As a matter of reality, most young students with healthy, high-acuity, physically symmetrical and functionally coordinated and orderly working learning-conduit visual and audio sensory systems [perceptual systems], and a such tactile-digital sensory system for art, music-instrument and braille-reading-dependent blind students, along with an overall healthy, normal brain, a good attention span and sufficient memory power [metaphorically speaking, good attention and memory muscle power], should, for the most part, be ready and able to learn well academically and make for good-learner students. This is especially so if parents have routinely told and read their children stories as post-infant children [in having done this, parents would have nurtured the development of the child's ability to listen, mentally-imaginatively focus and pay attention at length while the child's fresh brain was in rapid growth in the rapid-growth stage of the brain for a human], if they have encouraged their children’s learning by having nurtured their reading and proper speech [in having supported, personally modeled, or established and enforced, proper-speech standards], if they have nurtured in their children positive-social-bonding “social” singing [choir, folk songs, spirituals, and other genres of songs for sing along and sing together] and dancing and other positive interpersonal and social skills [as contrasted with negative social bonding as exemplified in the formation of packs and gangs and their antisocial, bad behavior, like rat-pack and gang fighting, gang rape, bullying, coercing, extorting, robbing, etc.], and if they or family members have given their children learning and creativity-exercising toys and games, including musical instruments, bicycles, skates, skateboards and social or team–sports play gear, or have enrolled their children in early start, private music, art or reading, writing and counting or arithmetic school. However, since humans are highly emotional beings, and functionally complex and quirky, despite their biologically-indicated normal, structurally and functionally sound, learning capability, they may have an aversion, lack of confidence, aspiration or motivation, or the three of the latter, or other psychological block, for whatever reason, for learning something or somethings they theoretically should be able to learn with normal effort or ease or learn well. Furthermore, a diet high in junk food, including junk-food beverages, can undermine the competent cognitive, as well as general psychological, functioning of both youth and adults of all ages. In addition, personal genetics may have some influence in cognitive-educational dysfunction, but an influence that is not necessarily immutable.

Also, we must never abandon, neglect or minimize art education, as the art skills are the origin and foundation of uniquely grandiose human creativity and cognitive endeavors and accomplishments, transcendent in comparison to the creativity and cognitive products of the other creatures of our planet — ingenuity is a version of creativity that is generally viewed as strategic and technical and associated with problem solving, innovation and informal and formal engineering. They are the foundation of design, writing, reading, math, manuscripts and books, education, architecture, building construction, engineering, science and technology, all of the fine and high arts and commercial arts [including poetry and chef and gourmet cooking], civilized society, and our advanced industry and economies. It all started with communally- or tribally-based regularized self stimulation of the brain [sensory-neurocortical self stimulation, with the term "neurocortical" referring to the neuronal cerebral-cortex and neocortex structures of the brain in which the advanced mental processes are based and in which they arise] via drawing, rock-art and cave, etc., drawing and picture painting, body-art painting and adornment, including with jewelry and fabrics [those fashioned and animal skins, furs, feathers, etc.], wood and stone carvings and sculptures and such fashioned musical instruments; handicrafts, primitive weapons and tool making; communal storytelling, deity worship, drum beating, singing and dancing, and dramatic, contest and other entertainment performances, very often around the tribal-communal campfire or fire pit [one can safely bet a fortune on the tenability of the claim that altars and candles in traditional houses of worship descended from this prehistorical background]. If there was no drawing [advanced-art mental process, with drawing exceeding the object-art, or tangibles-art, mental process of our closest primate cousins the Neanderthals] to start, we would have no alphabets, numbers, writing, reading, math, manuscripts, libraries, advanced education, ad infinitum, and advanced society on Earth, nor the cumulative, literacy-based, collective creativity and genius and technical knowledge and skills on which advanced society, or civilization, was and is built.

At the gate of the Bohemian village of post-apes [but with hunters, and susceptible to combat]: Indeed, I propose that the earliest uniquely human societies of our lineage of human were strongly populated by artisans and artists and aficionados and consumer-users of the gamut of arts and crafts [also including all varieties of smithing, masonry, primitive manufacturing and the early trades] and that the greatest innovation, or invention, of our species, along with human language, was and is the innovation, or invention, of education, being the teaching and learning relationship, or the mentor and protege relationship, that has greatly evolved, for preserving, dispersing, accumulating, improving and disseminating collective human knowledge, know-how [socially and institutionally nurtured and cultivated purposeful and applied intuition and improvisational ability as familiarly seen in music, the arts, sports and science and engineering projects] and skills and innovations and inventions from generations to generations of successive humans of, in net effect, comparatively advancing and advanced societies. Seemingly, the presence of human language [thinking and speaking communication, interpersonally or internally, in words, basic pictorial symbols [informational imagery] for words, or word strings, and syntactical sentences via voice, gestures or gestural signs, writing, braille, graphics or graphs, etc.] and the teaching and learning relationship [education] weaned our species from being driven in our behavior predominately by our instincts, impulses and reflexes and made our species substantially a learning-based and learning-directed species [highly reliant on individual and communal acquisition, sharing and the generational conveyance of information, knowledge and skills for the competitive survival and thriving of our species -- also for the competitively advantaged survival and thriving of human communities in competition with each other], more than any other species on our planet; nevertheless, our species dependency on learning has certainly made our species more reflective and deliberative, or premeditative [goal and/or agenda conscious and focused, calculating, strategic, tactical, planful, etc.], in our actions, sometimes to our folly, as when our learning that directs us is mainly information, as opposed to actual knowledge, and can be misinformative fiction or fantasy posed as truth and knowledge, as in the information forms of deceit, myth, superstition, ideology, doctrine, dogma and propaganda.

Knowledge and skills learning, conveyed in the informal and formal teacher-student relationship [education], combined with knowledge extracting analytical intellect [learning by discernment:  decoding the rules of nature and deriving insights into the structures, qualities, mechanics and dynamics of nature, or the way nature works, by reckoning or figuring things out, in the course of observing, pondering, probing and tinkering with nature [[studying nature]], for the purpose of manipulating nature and rising above feral animal nature and exercising power over nature] is a shortcut human species mechanism or species meta-strategy, astronomically outpacing in speed and so outperforming in effectiveness the rigidity and limitations of instincts, impulses and reflexes and the hypo-glacially slow and creeping natural-selection, bio-evolutionary morphological somatic responses of the other animal species, for adapting to species, and individual, life-challenging or existence-threatening environmental conditions and competitive circumstances, routinely resulting in species extinctions, and epidemical and mass-interspecies-competitive mortality.  Such learning makes a species or creature behaviorally and strategically highly flexible and quickly able to affirmatively and effectively respond in the short term to challenges, threats and competition.  For instance, with such learning and knowledge conveyance [education] humans can liberate themselves from depending on foraging and hunting for food by our resorting to agriculture, aquaculture and herding [including bee keeping for agricultural crops’ pollination and making honey for human consumption], or livestock and chicken ranching, to raise, or grow, our food  and from undergoing millions of years of creeping somatic morphology in order to compete with apex predators such as tigers, lions, leopards, hyenas, crocodiles, boa constrictors, poisonous animals, bears, wolves, etc., on the animal weapons and defenses level [of large fangs and sharp, long, thick, hard claws and super-strength limbs for quick killing, mauling and maiming or such powerful limbs for running at extreme animal speeds, or of evolving wings or biological body armor, to better escape predators] by stockpiling pelting rocks, and making fire, thrusting and throwing spears, clubs, flora- and soil-camouflaged trenches [sometimes fitted with carved wooden spikes, for both  capturing and tripping and injuring prey and predatory animals], nets, ropes, poisonous darts, knives, bow and arrows, sling shots and swords and guns, and keeping, breeding and deploying martyrous guard and fighting dogs, to defeat the apex predator animals and by using these as well as grenades, bombs and missiles, etc., to combat rival populations and individuals of our own species.  Notably, we can also raise herds of animals such as horses, donkeys, camels and elephants for our long-distance and extreme-temperature-environments means of transportation for travel and migration, commerce and combat as well as make rafts, boats and wind-sail ships, and land, water and air motor vehicles for the same purpose rather than be geographically limited or impeded by our own, basically humble, biological locomotion, like the other animals are, and for hugely increasing our freight and resources carrying capacity.

Caveat emptor! If a professor from Stanford University or a curriculum teacher-administrator from Arizona has come to public attention in the interview mass media with a book, backed up by and citing statistics, asserting that homework [content or performance practice and drill exercises for learning] do not establish, reinforce, improve or increase learning or that conversational and written intellectual introspecting, subjectivizing, opining, querying and discoursing, under the leadership and supervision of the guru teacher-lecturer [largely the Socratic method of pedagogy good for developing contemplation, or philosophical thinking, and thoughtfulness for or in writing, but differing with the Socratic method by sprinkling it with academically embedded self-esteem- and confidence-building talk therapy features of psychotherapy, which may act to improve the attitude of some students and motivate them to compete and work academically], is a revolutionary, new method of pedagogy that will change student performance and achievement results on tests in all disciplines of learning, don’t believe them! Do not believe them because their pretense- or shabby-science assertions and data contradict the worldwide laboratory facts on learning and cognition established in a virtual infinity of hard-science knowledge accumulated from neurobiology, neuropsychology, psychophysiology, psychopharmacology and other sensory-motor ["motor" refers to the neural-muscular, or neural-muscular-skeletal, response system involved in bodily and body movement, inclusive of both visceral and striated muscle] and brain science-disciplines related to learning and cognition. If these assertions, arguments and statistics contradict replicated, peer-reviewed and -tested, mechanistic, laboratory studies, whose results are forever repeatable using the same, competent research procedure, those assertions, arguments and statistics are wrong and worthless, and those authoring and advancing them are likely making wishful-thinking, if not financially predatory, claims [delusion- and hope-baited fish hooks for anxious parents and the public discontented with the extent of the ineffectiveness of the educational system], offering simple, nonsense solutions to large-scale educational ineffectiveness in pursuit of sensational book sales, big, easy wealth and short-term fame. Even an honest lightning-speed-learning genius student will acknowledge that he or she variously needs to study, practice, rehearse and review the subject-matter content, procedures and actions, or performances, of math operations and the branches of math, science disciplines, foreign languages, musical instruments, etc., the learning media, new to him or her for learning. Whereas response generalization is an established fact in learning science, it has been demonstrated to occur for similar kinds of learning behavior, such as in prior training in piano playing particularly facilitating the learning of organ playing or other finger-played musical instruments and not so much or as much the learning of highly skilled drawing or equipment assembly, and not or little for distinctly different learning behavior.

Operationally speaking, learning fundamentally, but complexly in humans, is in major part the product of, in psychobabble, classical and operant stimulus-response conditioning, response reinforcement through reward and penalty [internal and external, that are direct, indirect or vicarious], information feedback and response repetition and optimization [honing and shaping, or maximizing and hardening], together with mainly, in academia, the learner’s visual, auditory and tactile-digital sensory systems [the perceptual, or perceiving, systems involved in academic learning] and his or her cognitive processes of attention-perception, concentration, visualization, language, thinking-reasoning and “input and output memory work,” and the resulting formation of neurocognitive, new-learning cell networks in the brain (referred to as neurocortical wiring or rewiring, leading to memory consolidation or hardened learning]. Motivation and effort on the part of the individual also importantly figure into learning success and quality. [Ultimately, in a socially intellectual regard, without a direct reference to biology, memory is mentally stored perceptions, aggregated perceptions or experience of external or internal stimuli [[including information, knowledge, thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions, plus]], of physical or imaginative origin, and our language is the external, as well as a mentally internal, “repository” of that accumulated memory or memorialized perception and experience [[including behavior and skills, plus]] and a means for recalling content from it, thinking about and communicating from its content, discussing its content and adding to its content.]

Furthermore, if a teacher proposes that “remembering what one is taught is unnecessary nowadays because we can now look up everything we want to know on the internet,” that person is not fit for “any” job outside of ivory-tower academia, or in it, as any job requires the worker to have an agile memory of the job’s actions, and often of its information set [job knowledge], and a prompt behavioral execution all of the actions and recall of its information set [the job knowledge], on reflex or self command, in the routine, repetitive, cost-effective performance of that job — I actually heard an articulate teacher say the former on radio, to my consternation. If teachers or school administrators, or their unions, argue against teaching to the test, they are arguing against a standard set of information, knowledge and skills for all students to acquire and possess in and from the educational process, preparing them to be employment-test ready and on-the-job trainable, based on what work they qualify for and are hired to do, or higher-education test-score competent and ready for higher education, and for informed civic participation. In so arguing, they are in large part arguing against students being job-market ready or higher-educational-market ready, whether for a vocational, professional or conventionally academic education, in a standard set of academic information, knowledge and skills to be so ready. However, if the set of standards is overwhelming for a significant percentage of students, to the dismay of teachers and school administrators, and thus are unrealistic, based on test feedback results, then the set of standards must be made practical and adjusted down.)

Students in K through 12 education should have learning workstations, instead of mere desks, that are equipped with an instructional computer, such computer devices, headsets and teaching-learning computer programs and all schools should be Wi-Fi connected and there should be large computer screens on the front wall and on the two sides walls of classrooms. Students also should have carry-around and use workbooks. If the public schools, K through 12, through colleges and universities, do not embark full force with their own aggressive and achievement-competitive student-labor-engaged workbook-style online educational programs immediately, they will become behind-the-times, antiquated educational institutions in the learning achievement results of their students, including their best, collectively, for very many courses, if not many diploma and degree programs, compared to the learning achievement results of the students of the current online educational institutions with an early start and that are already well established, and are evolving and improving continually in their instructional-programs’ and learning-results’ effectiveness, some current online educational institutions of which are likely to broaden the reach of their instruction across the spectrum of educational levels. Even professional educational programs involving much actual hands-on work and lab work or workshops, such as the medical, engineering and law profession programs, will be better served with many of their courses being completed online by their students.

This new model of education will likely discomfort the center-of-education guru teacher-lecturer or professor, of the traditional mainstream model of education, for whom the glamorous and power-figure role of lecturing and whiteboard instruction will be supplemental and subordinate to student-centered learning by workbook-style laboring, in which instructors and TAs become servants, coaches and facilitators of student labor-engaged or task learning, as well as become classroom supervisors and student-discussion supervisors and referees — all classes should have at least one weekly discussion period, led by a different student each week, on a rotating basis, including under-performing students, permitted to fumble, persevere and improve.

Because some stalwarts for the highly ineffective status-quo model of education may disparage the dawning new model of education as a “Shut up, sit-down, [do] and learn!” model is no reason to concede to their self-interested prejudice toward it and back away from the new model’s inevitably superior results in educating students outside of their educational turf, the educational turf they control – a new model whose early performance results will be at a reliable, telling level within probably three to five years, which I expect will objectively show the new model already to have outperformed the overall product of the traditionalist-model of education.  The traditionalists may be able to undermine and discredit the product of this new model and defeat it on their own turf but not so outside of their turf, at which point online education and classroom, student labor-engaged learning and education would necessarily make the compelling case, in view of its competitively advantaged results with all stripes of students, for competing for taxpayer dollars to non-discriminatorily far better educate students of all stripes and from all walks of life.  These traditionalist pedagogic Luddites should consider how new-model educators outside of their turf may describe their model:  “Shut up, sit down and listen to and watch me, and follow my orchestration, and learn! (for the few of you who can adequately and durably learn this way, probably with the assistance of educated parents or such a parent who can help you at and prepare you from home for class).”  Traditional, but always improving, methods of teacher-student interactive, student-labor-engaged education, especially in early grades, foundational knowledge and skills classroom education will remain valuable if not indispensable to formal, basic education – these need more emphasis in educating.  For instance, instructors can have groups of young students go to the whiteboard in waves and have individuals in the groups work on individual math operations and problems, or on write (construct) and understand correct sentences (analyze sentences and identify parts of speech and component sentence structures within them, as well as practice thinking and speaking in correct, or proper, sentences, and analyzing, syllabicating and understanding how to properly spell and interpret the meaning of words and on how to conjugate irregular versus regular verbs -- word and sentence dissection, using circles, double circles, underlines, double underlines, connecting overarching curved lines, obliques or back splashes, rectangles, with name labels for parts of speech and sentence structures, as opposed to the often befuddling diagramming of sentences), or assembling geographic or astronomy puzzles at their desks, or on their computers or in teamwork with respect to a classroom computer screen on a wall, or on other tasks that are labor-engaged learning, meaning students need not learn primarily by computers but can do all sorts of learning and academic training things in class, that hold them to task and actively engaged in learning and academic work (including taking turns making very brief, skeletal book, chapter, biography or concept reports, etc.) and hold them learning accountable in the classroom.

(All students, regardless of I.Q. and academic achievement levels, should be accorded a sense of belonging, equal human value, membership and relevance, and be treated with equal respect and accorded equal opportunity to participate and serve in class activities and roles, and to grow intellectually and academically, by instructors, as well as be treated as student peers by instructors and fellow students alike. All children, including those organically retarded, have the potential for neurocognitive growth and appreciable intellectual and talent improvement and have their own individual rates and trajectories of psychological and cognitive or intellectual development and capacities for growth [individual differences], contingent on and subject to nurturing, cultivation and optimization by learning engagement and experiences, and training and education. Because an individual starts off smart [as more learning, thinking, creativity and performance enabled or with overall or institutionally-key greater learning, thinking, creative and performance facility] or not smart does not mean that individual will remain that way, in either case; however, if that individual persists in engaging and working his or her brain and abilities, he or she can stay smart or become smart or smarter, in most instances. Schools should foster the educational and cognitive development of all of their students with equal commitment and not fixate on the evident, presently smart ones to the marginalization or exclusion in any way of the cognitively or intellectually in appearance less endowed ones, by refraining from the common practice of concentrating leadership and academic responsibilities and privileges in those presently academically more capable or ahead [in the acquisition and exercise of knowledge and skills, and ease of or facility for such, and demonstrated higher levels of knowledge and skill], and largely limiting them to these early bloomer, in-smarts, students.

Human neural/neuronal plasticity [ability for significant or dramatic positive change in abilities through sustained mental exertion: effort-based mental stimulation, being neurocortical stimulation, by the mentally laboring individual, or cognitive work, being primarily learning, thinking and performance work] is an established fact, as is latent learning and are late bloomers in high-level cognitive and intellectual development and achievement — engagement in reading, writing, math, informational-listening, or music or other art work is neurocortical self-stimulation activity or work or largely literacy thinking and learning work. The larger, or higher, an individual’s stimulus threshold for learning a particular subject matter [item, body or field of knowledge or information] or particular skill, the less facility or knack an individual has for that learning and the more the individual will have to cognitively work or train [required learning-work baseline] to learn [activate, establish or acquire, or a mix of these] the particular knowledge, information or skill, or achieve a desired level and precision of knowledge or skill, as in an individual’s knowledge quotient and mastery for a given subject matter or skill level for a particular type, instrument or tool of performance or task]. The more work required of an individual for him or her to learn will require more motivation, both internal and external, especially in youth, of him or her to do the required greater amount of learning work. Levels of ability aptitudes [degree of knack or inaptitude, or ineptitude, for knowledge, information and skill acquisition or learning], subject to development and improvement by learning and education, may vary in an individual and change on their own, by circumstances or through work on the part of and for the same individual. Individuals may also have different aptitudes for contemplative-, reasoning-content/process-dominate learning versus rote–content/process-dominate learning. At root, learning is automatically or willfully recallable memory, and often its deployment, of information, knowledge, skills or performance, the latter two of which are most synonymous with externalized acquired behavior [or externalized learned behavior].

Incidentally, three famously familiar intellectual late-bloomer, apex achievers in academics and science are 19th Century's field biologist and pioneer of evolutionary science Charles Darwin, author of 'On the Origin of Species' and 'The Descent of Man,' 20th Century’s Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, professor of theoretical physics and author of the theoretical physics treatise on the general and special theories of relativity, and our 21st Century’s Craig Venter, professor of biology and pharmacology, the lead and directing scientist in the private-enterprise decoding-of-the-human-genome project and pioneer scientist in synthetic biology.)

In addition to providing students with a forum for discussing topics of the week and sharing and exchanging their learning insights and gratifying solutions to especially challenging problems, as well as for airing their lingering unsolved problems with their learning and inviting peer, and, as necessary, instructor, guidance to their solutions, these discussion periods would ingrain in students mutually civil and respectful informal debating skills and good conversational, interpersonal and democratic-society responsibility-sharing and power-sharing skills. They would be a vehicle for the positive, democratic-society socialization of youth. I assert that much of the bully and dominance-based disrespect and violence by individuals and groups of students toward, and negative stereotyping, devaluation and dehumanization of, one another, carried over to adulthood, stems from a lack of democratic civility and tolerance for different and, many times, more vulnerable, others that results from a lack of socialization in democratic-society values and social skills.

I also favor that all testing and grading be done online or by computer and annually test-certified subject-matter-expert testing, grading and improvement-performance-feedback personnel (Ph.D.s) anonymous to students and teaching staff. We must not fear and obstruct digital and student-direct labor-engaged and oriented education, in all of its incarnations, for it will be, with its refinement in the short term, the highly beneficial, en masse, results changer and equalizer in education. The student comes first, as well as the taxpaying citizens’ efficient investment.

Non-profit (NP), free online educational institutions can permanently offer free education and simultaneously expand by adopting the existing NP funding model utilized by some NP corporations or organizations of enlisting a supportership of financial patron donors (sustained or lifelong or long-term supporters donating annually for voluntary tiered donor amounts, based on the comfort of the individual or entity), donors who are dedicated to and in support of free online education, and its accreditation by government and acceptance [of its course-certificate and degree-vested students] by business, and of anytime, discretionary special and convenience-paying donors, and by offering as gifts for donations, or for sale in support of the NP, downloadable and hard-media educational software programs and other recordings, such as educational movies and documentaries, and lectures by or interviews with accomplished or celebrity intellectuals hosted by themselves or others, as well as by conducting special fundraising campaigns and accepting ads at their websites from paying advertisers not interfering with their intellectual-integrity-based educational mission and service/s (especially ads and ad-money and support donations from educational-content and intellectual-media advertisers, such as brain-exercise media like Lumosity, learning-oriented toy makers and vendors, the bookstores Barnes & Noble and Amazon, the publications National Geographic, Nature, New Scientist, Psychology Today, Scientific American, Smithsonian, etc., while declining ads and ad money and support donations from political, distinctly ideological, violence-related and unsavory-enterprise or -source advertisers).