Educational Benefits of the Internet

"Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite ineducable, yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators. And that is the secret of all education: it does not lend artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacled eyes---rather, what can give these things is only the afterimage of education."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator"

Is the Internet powerful enough to reach the peaks of an education defined by such a giant as Nietzsche in his 1874 paean to Arthur Schopenhauer? Is the Internet a liberator, or does it simply provide information as means to technology? Is the internet a mere "afterimage of education"?

However, the internet offers a new opening for old fashioned education, and better yet, old fashioned education available in a novel way - potentially available to the many rather than to the few. An old fashioned education (liberal arts) consists in information, critical thinking, creativity, and communication. The Internet augments all four of these components and thus offers at least four different educational benefits.

Misconceptions

Today, it's perhaps the case that a distinction of the variety that Nietzsche makes between education and applied knowledge is no longer recognized. "Education" may have collapsed into provision for "artificial limbs, wax noses, or spectacled eyes" - education perhaps misunderstood as technology or as training.

A major misconception then about education is that it is a formal and distant means to other ends - a means to money, a means to jobs, a means to "success", a means to obtaining skills or at least to obtaining a piece of paper that alleges those skills. Education is often misconceived to the extent that it may appear at the bottom of a chain leading to any or all of those things. That sort of means is not education at all, but rather training, or at best, glorified "voc. ed.".

Education in the context of the worldwide web doesn't mean simply "taking classes on the Internet", nor learning a set of skills, but rather is a much broader and depthier phenomenon; it is education understood as liberating process. Above and beyond formal "educational settings" on the internet, such as virtual classrooms and the like, the Internet itself is an educational setting. Whereas the ancient Greeks had the polis, Socrates wandering about, and Plato's Academy, today we have the Internet.

Information as Benefit

Information and its distribution are the most obvious educational aspects of the Internet. On the web we can find information that runs as "deep" as physics and philosophy to as trivial as the name of a celebrity's pet hamster. Concrete examples of information distribution on the Internet range from the informality of instant messaging to the formality of online degree programs. Information is available via email, via voice, via online "movies," and through the various blogs and forums now peppering the web. Popular tools such as Google and Wikipedia offer information rapidly, if not always comprehensively. Of course, there are also countless other websites, from library card catalogs to virtual museums that may be researched.

Education may be about liberation, but basic information is required to provide a framework for a truly liberating education. "Knowledge is power", goes the adage. For example, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution speaks to freedom of speech and freedom of the press for the same reasons that various regimes (sometimes even including American regimes) try to censor information - knowledge in the hands of the people is "power to the people".

As such, the power of the Internet to put information in the hands of the people cannot be overstated. According to internetworldstats.com, as of 2008, nearly 22% of the world's population were internet users - not a majority, but a growing minority, as the percentage more than tripled from 2000-2008.

One educational benefit of the internet is then its contribution to the growing availability of information.

Critical Thinking as Benefit

"China now has over 160 million Internet users, making it the second largest market for Internet access globally, after the United States.Adoption of the internet is having a profound effect on the formation and dissemination of culture and even political ideologies since it enables access to widely different kinds of information, news coverage and debate. From the government's perspective, some of these effects are harmful to society, which has underpinned and galvanized a long-term policy of Internet censorship.The government continues to pursue a vision of absolute internet censorship, in which the network is sanitized of subversive concepts, words, debates and events". Source: International Herald Tribune

The case of China illustrates how informational aspects of the Internet jibe with critical thinking aspects and thus education. Critical thinking is the backbone of education as it liberates us by exposing and thus destroying prejudices. Critical thinking is about evaluating truth claims and value claims. In order for critical thinking to effectively occur though, a knowledge base (reference point) is required, a knowledge base that is available on the Internet.

Thus a second educational benefit of the Internet is its ability to facilitate critical thinking.

Creativity as Benefit

If it is true that in order to create, one must first destroy, then at the very least the Internet offers the destruction (via critical thinking) necessary for creation. Art involves the questioning and/or creating of values, and thus it is at least as much a part of education-liberation as is critical thinking. In fact, art and creation might be viewed as the right brain's answer to the destructiveness of the left brain. In the wake of the destruction of prejudice - a void.

The Internet is as much a gaping void of knowledge and values as it is a vast repository of such. The void is what provides the Internet with its dynamism. No void, no change. For every gap, there is an opportunity to create. For each thesis and antithesis, there is a synthesis hatching. In turn, each synthesis is ripe for destruction followed by creation anew. This process is none other than the educational process writ large.

Its provision of opportunities for creativity then is a third educational benefit of the internet.

Communications as Benefit

Nearly as obvious as the informational aspects of the internet are its communications aspects. In fact, the two are inseparable. Information is only good insofar as it is communicated, and communication is only communication as such where information is exchanged. Dialogue can be viewed very roughly as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Ideas are put forth, they are scrutinized, and new ideas flow from this.

Concrete examples of give-and-take (dialogical) communication via the internet include email, instant messaging, voice chat, internet phone, blogs, forums, tutoring/coursework, and even webcams, since body language is an underrated type of communication.

Finally, the Internet's contribution to the ease and growing availability of communications comprises yet a fourth educational benefit.

Actionability

Praxis, or pragmatic action in a sociopolitical framework, can be inferred from the four preceding components of education as offered by the internet. The internet offers a means for education that can be advanced in order to attain the benefit of liberation for individuals. Individuals may in turn act to spur the liberation of entire peoples.

With the help of the internet, barriers can be destroyed and fetters broken by taking critical stances toward social structures. Then through art (broadly understood) and communication (again with the help of the internet) liberation can be won.

Resources

• Schopenhauer as Educator
• How to Discern the Difference Between Training and Education
• Free Press - reform media, transform democracy