The online education system

Editor's note: Michael Devaney is an economics and finance professor and author of the book "A Plague of Experts: Intellectual Hubris and the Failure of Expertise."

The academic achievement of American public school children continues to lag, partly because of a vast network of education experts who impose their ever-changing theories on teachers and students.

SEMO has struggled to replace the top-down teachers' college culture with a bottom-up university culture. Department faculty develop a core of knowledge much of which the economist Friedrich Hayek characterized as "tacit knowledge" or what others might call the "tricks of the trade." Tacit knowledge is not easily transmitted. It is best learned by doing, i.e. it is easy to convey to another a recipe for making chili; it is much harder to tell someone how to ride a bicycle or play a respectable game of golf.

The tricks of the trade in university teaching pertain to both content and discipline-specific pedagogy. The university model is supposed to monitor quality via the hiring, tenure and promotion process but SEMO is now poised to impose a top-down model of online teaching -- "quality" by a panel of education experts.

The real quality issue at SEMO is not online pedagogy but a curriculum and grading system that has allowed the mean GPA in some majors to exceed 3.8. As the Department of Education under Barack Obama expands its vast bureaucracy in higher education, we can only hope that the education experts do a better job than they did with our public schools.

MICHAEL DEVANEY, professor of economics and finance, Cape Girardeau