SUBMITTED BY MICHAEL TRUCANO  ON TUE, 08/27/2013

Video can be used in many ways to assist professional development. One possibility is using video of a working student teacher together with coaching. There are some other uses of video that would be objected to in many societies and cultures.

Can we extend it over most or all of a modern population?

I don't think we can, if we are to see it in terms of college buildings, class rooms, tutors, professors and the like. Here again, just as in the case of schooling, we have to raise the neglected problem—neglected so far as education goes—of economy of effort; and we have to look once more at the new facilities that our educational institutions have so far refused to utilize. Our European colleges and universities have a long and honourable tradition that again owes much to the educational methods of the Roman Empire and the Hellenic world. This tradition was already highly developed before the days of printing from movable type, and long before the days when maps or illustrations were printed. The higher education, therefore, was still, as it was in the Stone Age, largely vocal. And the absence of paper and so forth, rendering notebooks costly and rare, made a large amount of memorizing necessary. For that reason the mediæval university teacher was always dividing his subject into firstly and secondly and fourthly and sixthly and so on, so that the student could afterwards tick off and reproduce the points on his fingers—a sort of thumb and finger method of thought—still to be found in perfection in the discourses of that eminent Catholic apologist, Mr. Hilaire Belloc. It is a method that destroys all sense of proportion between the headings; main considerations and secondary and tertiary points get all catalogued off as equivalent numbers, but it was a mnemonic necessity of those vanished days.

And they have by no means completely vanished. We still use the lecture as the normal basis of instruction in our colleges, we still hear discourses in the firstly, secondly and thirdly form, and we still prefer even a second-rate professor on the spot to the printed word of the ablest teacher at a distance. Most of us who have been through college courses can recall the distress of hearing a dull and inadequate view of a subject being laboriously unfolded in a long series of tedious lectures, in spite of the existence of full and competent text-books. And here again it would seem that the time has come to centralize our best teaching, to create a new sort of wide teaching professor who will teach not in one college but in many, and to direct the local professor to the more suitable task of ensuring by a commentary, by organized critical work, and so forth, that the text-book is duly read, discussed and compared with the kindred books in the college library.

This means that the great teaching professors will not lecture, or that they will lecture only to try over their treatment of a subject before an intelligent audience as a prelude to publication. They may perhaps visit the colleges under their influence, but their basis instrument of instruction will be not a course of lectures but a book. They will carry out the dictum of Carlyle that the modern university is a university of books.

I do not think that our educational and university authorities realize how far the college stage of education has already escaped from the local limitations of colleges; they do not understand what a great and growing volume of adolescent learning and thought, of college education in the highest and best sense of the word, goes on outside the walls of colleges altogether; and on the other they do not grasp the significant fact that, thanks to the high organization of sports and amusements and social life in our more prosperous universities, a great proportion of the youngsters who come in to their colleges never get the realities of a college education at all, and go out into the world again as shallow and uneducated as they came in. And this failure to grasp the great change in educational conditions brought about, for the most part, in the last half-century, accounts for the fact that when we think of any extension of higher education in the modern community we are all too apt to think of it as a great proliferation of expensive, pretentious college buildings and a great multiplication of little teaching professorships, and a further segregation of so many hundreds or thousands of our adolescents from the general community, when as a matter of fact the reality of education has ceased to lie in that direction at all. The modern task is not to multiply teachers but to exalt and intensify exceptionally good teachers, to recognize their close relationship with the work of university research—which it is their business to digest and interpret—and to secure the production and wide distribution of books throughout the community." The Salvaging of Civilization, 1921 by H.G. Wells, Ch: 7 College, Newspaper and Book