It is easy to believe that the emerging competition in providing web based courseware has great potential to reverse the growing unaffordability and inaccessibility of higher education. In fact, like all powerful technologies, the internet has yet to fully reveal its potential side-effects. As far as the value of history, we are creatures whose confidence in action derives almost entirely from inductive reasoning. Through induction, we calculate what is liable to happen from what has happened. We are confident that the sun will come up in the morning, that our computers will turn on, and that our neighbors will be reluctant to shoot us because that is the way it worked out for us yesterday, the day before, and the day before that.
History is thus a vast repository of navigational cues.
To deny this would be derelict. So while we do like the internet, we also like history and we also understand and respect contrary points of view. Rousseau earned his fame, and we think justifiably, by taking issue in his first discourse with the idea that progress in the natural sciences automatically implies progress in the human condition. Do not make the fatal mistake of assuming that anyone automatically does or should view the world as you do. Just because you are a Republican, Democrat, Muslim, Catholic, Mormon, or Atheist does not mean everyone is or necessarily should be.