The role of education and an effective
educational system in a democratically ruled state has been
the subject of great debate throughout the centuries. Democracy,
or the rule of the people by the people, has its foundations
in the Greek city-state of Athens where the concept of one
citizen-one vote was first proposed and adopted.
While many might argue that Athenian
democracy was somewhat limited in that there were 30,000 citizens
or so but also countless thousands of slaves and non-citizens
for whom democracy was but a chimera. Yet, for the period
and the age, Athenian democracy was revolutionary and dynamic
and relied on the institution of education and educated citizens
in order to make its democracy work. This then, is the role
that education plays in the American democracy but with much
greater integration into the democratic system and online
education is currently fueling even greater spread and penetration
of democracy around the globe.
Education in any aspect might be considered
the twin sister to democratic forms of government. The United
States government observes that education is one of the primary
principles of democracy because education is a basic human
right and that all democracies have an obligation to provide
all citizens with basic human rights.
However, education's role in democratic
governments goes much further than being a mere service delivery
of the government. Education makes democracy work by educating
citizens in the principles of governance, enabling literacy,
transmission of democratic values and beliefs, and by engendering
a free press. With these qualities in mind, it can be seen
that online education accomplishes all these particular imperatives
Online education is the pure democratization
of education because most people would admit that while the
educational system in America, for example, has been a pillar
of democracy for many years the education system itself is
not democratically run or structured. All that has changed
now with the advent of online education and the brave new
world it brings with it, to quote Aldous Huxley.
Traditional education systems, even within
vibrant democracies like the United States, are hierarchically
arranged and ruled by fiat with students told what to do and
instructed on what to take and where. While certainly these
traditional education formats are valuable and have been effective,
they have not been democratically operated in and of themselves.
Online education awards students with a
voice and a vote so to speak that allows them to state their
opinions by choosing which programs to take, which courses
to enroll in, and when and where to study. The benefit is
that online education can effectively teach any topic that
is offered in a traditional educational venue but actually
expands the functionality and experience of the learner because
of the format's access to online educational devices such
as video, video-conferencing, hyperlinked sources, research
databases, and an infinite network of colleagues.
This access to programs, material,
and media in online education is the quality that makes online
education indispensable to democracy because democracy is
all about choices. Noam Chomsky says, in a lecture delivered
at Loyola University in 1994, that democracy and education
are both dependent on and guarantors of choice in society.
With this in mind then it is plain that online education is
not only critical to American style liberal democracy but
is also a manifestation of the growth of democracy in the
21st century because it literally makes no distinction in
terms of class, income bracket, or celebrity.