Students and teachers actions are predominantly determined by social norms. Teachers and students actions are predominantly determined by technical rules. Teaching aims at preserving the institution. Students are punished on the basis of conventional sanctions. They fail because of decisions made by the authority of teacher, headmaster, director of education.
Students fail because of their inability to cope with the reality of learning at a distance.
They drop out of their courses, for instance. Over the long run, Peters tended to see the spread of distance learning as being, like industrialization, an historic inevitability, since it was both more egalitarian and also brought great efficiencies. But Peters also thought it would impose terrific social costs in terms of what was lost. In a fundamentally conservative way, therefore, like Tocqueville looking for ways of preserving aristocratic modes in an egalitarian democracy, Peters insisted on the radical separation of the two forms of learning for as long as it was practically possible. Peters, in fact, played an enormously important practical role in this, since it was he who was in charge of implementing the government program for distance learning in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 70s.