Right now MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses — are the hip and newfangled thing that education nerds (and just regular nerds) have glommed onto. This is because they are disruptive, a word that sends little shivers of excitement through Silicon Valley folk. Nobody has really explained why disruption is such an unalloyed good. Things just need to be disrupted, apparently. Disruptive thinking leads to some cool, if peculiar, ideas, like iTunes but for groceries or whatever, or iTunes but for college courses, which is what MOOCs are.

In a New York Times article (“Two Cheers for Web U!”) published this past weekend, author A.J. Jacobs enrolled in a number of MOOCs offered by Coursera. Other online education companies mentioned are Udacity (which has been hailed as the Napster of higher education) and edX. At the end, Jacobs gives his semester of MOOCs a B grade, saying that these disruptive Web programs will “likely have enormous real-world impact” and “may even be life-changing.” Lest he sounds totally won over, Jacobs is sure to add a dose of skepticism: Universities of “brick, mortar and ivy” are wonderful places to network, he reminds the reader. And, to show his good humor, he points out that Internet college is not a Playboy-certified party school. 

This article was published only a couple of days after members of the University faculty union met with officials of the administration to discuss pay increases. Faculty salaries at UO are among the lowest in the United States. Low faculty pay, high tuition costs, debilitating student debt — it certainly looks like higher education needs a swift, disruptive kick to the curb.

That would be too easy, but to the TED set, everything has an easy fix as long as you “gamify” or “apptomize” or disrupt it. However, such pursuits sacrifice deep, critical understanding of how and why the world works (or doesn’t work) in favor of shallow, whiz-bang tinkering. As impressive as these feats may be, they’re only as good as the next disruption.

Of course, that’s how life goes: You solve one problem, only for another to arise, requiring another solution. Alas, MOOCs are not the solution to our education problem. They are an alternative, and as a culture we have confused alternatives and solutions. How does one solve a problem? Suppose that there is no alternative, and start from there. Figure out how to go through the problem, not around it. An app is not an answer, but a diversion.

The promise of online academies is really the promise of an escape from inefficient, human imperfection. It is a part of a certain view of humanity, one that declares the world is perfect. It is a view held by humans who aspire to be computers.

MOOCs are diverting the attention and money of the people in our country who have a lot of attention and money to give, away from the education system we already have. But we broke that, and in order to truly fix it we first have to acknowledge that somewhere down the road we messed up badly. It is easier not to.