Monologues of Learning

Abstract

In the award-winning film Educating Rita (1983), a hairdresser decides to find herself by taking an Open University course. Her English literature tutor is an alcoholic, in a failing marriage, and aspires to be a poet. The University of Liverpool don is saddened when Rita replaces her warm impulsive reactions by the sort of pretentious analytical approach he so much despises. Yet the teacher ends up learning as much from his pupil as she learns from him. The story is an inspiring tale of self-discovery and of the power of choice that comes through education, especially through the now unfashionable one-on-one tutoring. In the time of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is the education system ripe for a revolutionary change? One-on-one tutoring has existed since the beginning of civilization. Lecture-based instruction commenced before the invention of the printing press. Correspondence education is about a century old, and MOOC blasted off during the 2000s. There are already a number of journals devoted to online learning, teaching, and administration, for example, MOOCs Forum, Hybrid Pedagogy, and The Internet and Higher Education. In her influential lecture delivered at Oxford in 1947, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” celebrated crime writer, essayist, and Christian humanist Dorothy L. Sayers advocated a return to the method of the medieval university, which divided the syllabus into the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Acad. Quest. (2014) 27:310–312 DOI 10.1007/s12129-014-9435-2