Distance learning has been growing in popularity recently, and many people are arguing that it should be used instead of traditional schooling. However, I believe that distance learning would be detrimental to students because it takes away the physical connections between students, teachers, and peers, it allows students to slack off on their work, and online learning is not a reliable way to teach students.

When students do their learning online they are looking at a teacher, or their work through a screen which completely takes away the physical connection between the student and their teacher. This physical connection is important because it allows students to build relationships with their teachers, and the teachers can understand the student at a deep level. Students would also not be able to ask questions or receive help as easy as in a traditional school because in school all they have to do is raise their hand, but online they have to go through a much tougher process to get assistance. Distance learning would also hinder a students' ability to work with their peers on projects because they lose the benefit of communicating in person, and building a strong relationship in order to work together as a strong group.

Giving students the ability to learn online from the comfort of their own home puts a lot of trust in these students to actually get work done, but many of these students will choose to misuse this trust and slack off on their work. For example, if a student had the ability to sleep in longer or play video games instead of doing their schoolwork, many students would put schoolwork at a lower priority than these choices. This gives students the power to just not do their work and lose a lot of their motivation to continue working. Another question that needs to be asked of online learning is who would punish these students who slack off and choose to not do their work? If these irresponsible students did not care about getting their work done when they had to go to school, then why would they care about it when they can stay home and enjoy other things?

A strong defense for online learning is that it makes education more accessible to students who can't go to school for reasons such as not being able to afford it. Distance learning is also very simple because all you need is a device that can access the internet and the internet itself. Although distance learning does have these benefits of being simple and accessible, online learning is vulnerable and can not be trusted to reliably give students an education. There are many reasons why online learning is not reliable: the online learning platform can be hacked, a student's internet could not work properly, or the system could be too slow to handle many students being on it. These are big issues that are not uncommon and if they happened to someone who solely used online learning as their way of getting an education, then they would have no way to continue learning.

Getting rid of the physical connections, giving students too much trust that they will misuse, and online learning itself not being reliable are all reasons why I believe that students would not benefit from distance learning. Instead of switching to distance learning, we can instead try to reform traditional schools in order to give students a better place to learn and make learning more enjoyable for them.