From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Prof in a Box
A mail-order company gives us a second chance for education.
You've seen their ads many times, particularly if you read any serious political or cultural magazines. You can't miss the boldface come-ons: "Witness the Glory of Shakespeare," in National Review. "Follow the Story of Lost Christianities," in the Wilson Quarterly. "Enrich Your Music Listening Skills and Learn the Language of Music," in The New Republic. A recent Economist featured a full-page ad for "Who's Who in the Evolution of Western Medicine." Other typical subjects range from "Particle Physics for Non-Physicists" to "The Art of the Northern Renaissance."
The source of these promises, and of the DVDs, audio CDs and tapes created to deliver on them, is the Teaching Company of Chantilly, Va., an outfit begun 17 years ago by a Capitol Hill attorney named Thomas Rollins. After some rocky early years, the company has grown steadily to become the colossus of its field, the country's leading publisher of proprietary university-level courses for home use. With more than 200 courses already available and new ones being added almost daily--now including a line of courses directed at high-school and home-schooled students--and with all of them taught by reputable and often quite talented lecturers, the Teaching Company has become a serious force in American education. Such was evidently the opinion of Brentwood Associates, a well-heeled private equity investment firm in Los Angeles, which acquired the company last October for an undisclosed, but presumably handsome, sum.
But are the courses any good? The Teaching Company counts among its customers the likes of Bill Gates, Orrin Hatch, Bruce Hornsby and, well, me. Yes, I, and members of my family, have been using its products for at least five years now--listening to lectures in Roman history while driving to work, exploring the New Testament or James Joyce's "Ulysses" while walking the dogs, redressing my woefully deficient knowledge of the history of art by viewing entertaining and lavishly illustrated lectures after dinner. I've even taken a busman's holiday with the Teaching Company--watching tapes of master teachers giving lectures in my own field in order to improve my own classroom performance.
So these courses offer a constructive way to fill up the empty times of commuting, exercising and the like. But there is more to their appeal than that. As the generations of post-1960s college graduates grow older, they will come to understand that their expensive formal education, with its trendiness and lack of breadth or rigor or enduring substance, quite simply failed them--by failing to connect them to the riches of their own civilization. Not all of them will be content to leave matters at that, and so the market for the Teaching Company's products will only continue to expand.
But are such products, and the copycat courses and lectures increasingly being offered by universities such as Berkeley and Stanford, not to mention the various forms of "distance learning" used to extend the reach of educational institutions, really a substitute for the classroom? Isn't something important lost by the absence of the institution, and the teacher?
Call me self-interested for saying so, but of course there is. It explains why many of the same people who love Teaching Company products also, when their schedules permit, go back to school. I often see such older "returning" students in night classes at my university, and count it a privilege to work with them. Unlike the younger students, they are not there because they have to be. Their unfeigned passion for knowledge and self-improvement, their heightened stake in the material under study, are inspiring and infectious.
They come with motives deeper and more complicated than a mere desire to acquire organized and accredited knowledge about a subject. If that were all education was about, then, yes, DVDs and distance learning would soon supplant the classroom. But they want something more intangible than that. They come to school seeking some kind of renewal, hoping for a chance to better themselves--to pursue their deferred dream, or their unexplored interests--or just to move beyond the constraints of their current lives and perhaps learn what they didn't pick up the first time around. That's what the university represents for them, and it reflects a very American faith in human possibility.
And one of the chief things that they come to class for is something that a tape or a TV or even the best virtual connection cannot ever provide: The bodily presence of others. It is one thing to listen alone to a videotaped lecture, it is quite another to hear the same subject expounded by a flesh-and-blood human being standing there before you--someone responsive to your questions, attentive to your particular concerns, capable of cracking jokes about the events of the day, someone with the full range of human quirks and oddities, and yet also someone for whom the subject forms a living and present reality, and with whom you can have a personal relationship.
All honor, then, to the Teaching Company for doing what it does, providing Americans with things that they do not get elsewhere. Let traditional educational institutions take respectful note of their new competitor's success, and learn the right lessons from it: Rather than sneer, they should instead respond intelligently to the challenge, acknowledging that higher education has served its clientele poorly. Rather than imitate the Teaching Company by seeking to digitize and standardize and commodify ever more of their own offerings, colleges and universities should instead build on their comparative advantages, and focus on the humanizing effects that they uniquely can impart--and work to impart them better.
Mr. McClay is a humanities professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
