Virtual Schools on the Internet: Could this Cure Education's Woes?

In keeping with the theme of my last two entries (see What Are Virtual Schools For? and The Next Big Thing in Public Education?), it appears that this discussion has even reached the popular media...

Detroit Free Press - June 6, 2005
"Virtual schools on the Internet: Could this cure education's woes?"
By Mike Wendland
Free Press Columnist
By the way, thanks for the Distance-Educator.com Daily News for bring this to my inbox yesterday.

In discussing the Michigan Virtual High School, Wendland writes:

Fitzpatrick, based in Lansing, says education had been stuck in what is known as the 2-by-4-by-6 paradigm.

"In other words," he explained, "the two covers of a textbook, the four walls of a classroom and the six hours a day that students are in school. That's been the old model for the way we educated, and it's a model that's increasingly less efficient."

Online education breaks that paradigm and helps schools be as efficient as the rest of society in this always-on, instant access, wired world, he said.

"The way education works after high school, and certainly the way education and skills are developed in the professional world, is more and more dependent on some sort of technology-enabled system like the computer or the Internet," Fitzpatrick said.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Kind of sounds like a response to the question: Are virtual schools the panacea for an ailing public educaiton system? - breakng the 2-by-4-by-6 paradigm (as an aside, see my entry at Breaking into the Academy on education and paradigms) and helping schools be as efficient as the rest of society.

Thoughts?

Tags: virtual school, cyber school, high school, education