The bicycle argument

On a podcast a while ago, I was asked the question every online educator gets asked eventually. Isn’t in-person teaching better? Doesn’t a recorded course lose the magic of the classroom?

I answered with a bicycle.

“I want to buy myself a bicycle, because I can afford a bicycle. And I say to you, no, you know what, but the best way to feel travel is in an airplane, or a BMW.”

That is the whole argument, and I have never needed a better one. Of course the BMW is a better machine than the bicycle. Nobody disputes it. The dispute is about what the bicycle should be compared with. The people defending the premium option always compare it with the bicycle. The person buying the bicycle is comparing it with walking.

Education runs on this confusion at every level. A recorded course gets compared with a brilliant teacher in a small classroom, and loses. An affordable online program gets compared with the elite school across town, and loses. The comparison feels rigorous. It is actually a category error, because the student choosing the affordable option was never choosing between it and the elite school. The elite school costs more than their family earns. Their real alternatives were the affordable option or nothing.

When you compare the bicycle with walking, everything changes. Replayable explanation versus no explanation. Structured practice versus a textbook alone. A subject specialist on a screen versus no subject specialist within a hundred kilometres. These are the actual choices most students on this planet face, and in every one of them the imperfect option wins by a distance.

I have spent 24 years teaching in rooms, and I still teach in them. I know precisely what a live classroom does that a recording cannot. That knowledge is exactly why I built the bicycle anyway. The classroom I teach in holds a few dozen students. The recordings reach tens of thousands of free learners across 70+ countries, most of whom were never going to be in any classroom of mine, or in any classroom like mine.

The test I would offer parents, educators, and people who build in education is this. Before you dismiss an option as second-best, name the first-best honestly and ask whether the person in front of you can reach it. If they can, send them there. If they cannot, then the so-called second-best option is not second. It is first, and treating it as a compromise insults the person riding it.

Nobody walks because they were talked out of a bicycle by a man who owns a BMW. But in education we let that argument win every day, and we call it having standards.