Editor,

Gina Lea Nickl’s column (“Attending Class is Students’ Choice,” Sept. 15) gives every appearance of being smart, logical and persuasive8212;which makes me suspect that at some point she took an English class, but this makes me wonder why she assumes that all education comes from textbooks. “Showing up to class,” she argues, is “a waste of time, since students can read the book on their own.” While this may (however unlikely) be true in areas like math, psychology or business, in most humanities courses, no textbook can teach you the real content8212;how to read, reason and write critically about human experience8212;just as there are few quantified measures of performance that reduce knowledge to what Nickl calls “information.” Instead, such learning occurs almost exclusively in class, in collective analysis and discussion. The course texts do not contain the solutions, they constitute the problems. Her hopeful speculation, then, thanks to the Internet “much of class time might one day be obsolete” strikes me as philistinic, and the irresponsible product of a lazy, narrow, consumerist academic perspective.

I sympathize, however, with her frustration at professors who “lecture straight from the textbook.” Perhaps she should find other professors, or a different major. Or maybe she should consider one of those online “universities” where she can simply buy a diploma, and avoid the nuisance of education altogether.

Richard Preiss
Assistant Professor, English