Did the on-line education provider live up to his/her/its promises?
Did the student actually learn what he or she set out to learn?
Was the student able to use the contents of his or her education vocationally?

I can already hear some objections to the last question, battle cries from those in academia who are afraid of education and information getting into the hands of the plebeian masses.

But, if you study institutional history, you will learn that education, perhaps since the "dawn of time" and at least since 500 b.c.e. in Greece, has always been about training workers and maintaining social control.

The great Midwestern land-grant institutions, one of which being my undergraduate alma mater, were specifically designed to offer affordable education to the children of working-class and immigrant men and women.

In the South, the story is subtly but radically different given the Civil War and various fables of the reconstruction.

At UT - Austin, for example, which, to my knowledge, is one of only two public institutions of higher learning to honor Martin Luther King Jr. in the form of statuary, monuments to the Civil War dot the campus.

If you go to Ann Arbor, MI, or Madison, WI, you will find no such memorials.

Location, location, location. The World-Wide Web might well be the next frontier, complete with land-grabs, real-estate sales, money-grubbers, frauds, carpet-baggers and other such heroes and villains.

Let's do our best to make the story that unfolds remain dramatic, ethical, logical and beautiful.

Let's avoid electronic melodrama. Do not let anyone tie a helpless child to the information autobahn's tracks.

If you truly have the best interests of students at heart, then history will eventually tell your story. If you don't, then a different picture might develop.

What this issue really boils down to is control. Who has it, who wants it, and, more importantly, who should have it and what rules should govern inevitable conflicts.

For a while, ancient Greeks believed in open public debate to resolve conflict. All of us should have a pretty good idea of what happened next.

Does history really have to repeat itself? Or is that just a myth propagated by those in power?

-- Megan Greene, Independent Scholar/UT - Austin (posted 10/29, 10:25 a.m., E.D.T.)

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