Traditional students rebelling against online education

[rachel83az]

Being able to "defend" something that you've learned in school doesn't necessarily mean that you learned it any better or any worse than someone whose degree didn't include that component. They are different skillsets and having the "debate" skillset checked off doesn't mean that you got a better education by default. It just means that you learned how to debate.

I'm not saying debating isn't a valuable skill to have - it is. But debating doesn't mean that you know a subject better than someone else. One needs only to look at politics to see this. There are tons of lawmakers who have no idea about what they're debating (the lawmaker who said the internet was made of tubes and the lawmaker who thought Guam was going to tip over from overpopulation come to mind) but their skills in debating are such that they are often able to BS their way into getting their way regardless of this fact. One needn't go to school to learn how to debate, either.

Also, if you go to a prestigious (and expensive) school then you are more likely to come from a family that has money in the first place. Money makes money. Sure, there may be plenty of millionaires who graduated from Stanford, but how many of them came from families that had absolutely no money in the first place? Not many, I'm sure.