In this episode of The Open Door, Jim Hanink, Mario Ramos-Reyes, and Christopher Zehnder discuss with Dr. Randall B. Smith of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, the limits of distance education. It has been a necessity, at all levels, during the pandemic lock down. We will also contrast it with what many see as the ideal educational setting. We pose the following questions to him.

1. Education involves communicating information, and distance learning can be an effective way of doing so. On your view, though, education calls for much more. Can you tell us what else?
2. What is your experience in using online educational tools?
3. Is it true that most teachers and most students strongly dislike distance learning?
4. Should a good teacher aim to share, along with knowledge, a way of life?
5. Do most teachers see their work as a career or as a vocation?
6. Do most teachers love and enjoy their students?
7. Just what is Bloom’s Taxonomy? How does it show the limits of distance learning?
8. What do distance learning and introductory classes with 300 students have in common, from the viewpoints of teachers, students, and administrators?
9. You write: “All you really need for a first-rate education is first-rate teachers with some interested students and a pile of first-rate books and some basic laboratory equipment. Everything else is increasingly expensive icing on an increasingly less nutritious and insubstantial bit of sponge cake.” Who shares this position? Who disputes it?
10. What sort of financial support is needed to support the sort of school you have in mind? How likely are Catholics to provide that support?