University Diaries » “Carnegie Learning was acquired in August for $75 million by the parent of the for-profit University of Phoenix.”

There’s a beautiful synergy in play at Click-Thru U. Keep elementary, secondary, and then of course university students in front of computers and expensive software all the days of their lives, until they don’t even know that education used to mean human teachers and classrooms full of human beings discussing, questioning, scoffing, yawning, laughing… The jostle of real life, real encounters; the unscripted moments when, prompted or provoked by a brilliant lecture or an intense verbal exchange, you perceive something you never perceived before… when you come to knowledge as it lives its life, as it restlessly evolves, in a classroom with a passionate lecturer and focused students…

This is what the Click-Thrus will never know. All they will know is a continuation into schooling of the screen life they live outside the classroom. Theirs is all one seamless daily experience – Facebook, Gchat, texting, algebra, history, Facebook, Gchat, texting. No change of scene. No talking out loud. You want to say something, hit the keyboard. Feel something? Tap an emoticon.

The synergy in this post’s headline should surprise no one – the process by which the parent of for-profit Click-Thru U scoops up all the software and makes it possible for every American student to experience an entirely digitalized education is well underway. As the Powerpointed, laptopped, clickered classroom becomes intolerably pointless for everyone, the software will be there waiting.

Of course the software isn’t teaching anyone anything much, as the New York Times, reviewing the studies, reports. But the United States is such a rich county, with such a booming economy, that it doesn’t really need educated people.

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