Imagine being able to learn and attend school from the comfort of your own home. With the advent of distance learning, that just might become a reality. Distance learning would allow students to attend classes and participate in learning from home by way of online interaction or video conferencing. Allowing students to learn from home could have significant benefits, completely changing the traditional school system and altering the way we view school; however, it could also have some drawbacks, such as preventing teachers from monitoring students. Despite its potential drawbacks, distance learning would significantly benefit students, as it would resolve issues with the school transportation system and make it easier to attend school, cut down on the amount of time wasted in a traditional school environment, and prevent the spread of disease among school populations.

Today, transportation to and from school is slow, inconvenient, and wastes a large amount of time, requiring students to wake up earlier, walk to take a bus, and ride a slow, unsafe school bus to their school. In some cases, children cannot even get reliable transportation from buses and often get to school late due to issues with buses. At other times, students may not even be able to take a bus, and must get to school some other way, often taking time out of their parents' day as well as theirs. With distance learning, the issues of school transportation would be no more, as children would not have to worry about catching the bus or getting to school and could learn from home. This would allow students to get more sleep and to more reliably get to school, as they would no longer have to wake up early to catch the bus and would no longer have to worry about transportation issues making them late for school; they would simply have to wake up and walk to a computer in their house to access their school. Distance learning would undoubtedly mitigate the issues so often seen in the public school transportation system.

In today's school environment, a significant amount of time is wasted, with students taking time to walk from class to class, teachers showing up late, and large amounts of time wasted in class doing nothing. With distance learning, the school day could be compressed and shortened by removing things that waste time, such as traveling between classes and unused class time. Students doing schoolwork at home would be able to simply switch from one class to another after they have finished, and doing work online would shorten the amount of time it takes for teachers to teach and give work. Distance learning would also prevent students from being late to class, as the change between classes would become instantaneous if done online. If schools began using distance learning, it is very likely that the school day could be significantly shortened, giving students more time to do other things.

Recent events have shown how poorly the school system has performed in preventing the spread of disease among student populations. With the recent coronavirus outbreak, many school systems have shut down and moved to online learning to prevent the transmission of the disease between students. Currently, schools are a hotbed for the spread of disease, as sick students can infect many of their classmates due to the close proximity of students in schools. When sick students stay home, they prevent the spread of disease, but they are also forced to miss school and must make up work when they get back, leading to large workloads and lots of work. With distance learning, however, the spread of disease between students would be completely prevented, as there would no longer be any close contact between people. Many schools that have moved their classes online due to the COVID-19 outbreak have been very successful in both preventing the spread of disease and in continuing the education of students away from the physical school environment. Distance learning would completely prevent the spread of disease among students and faculty, and moving school over to distance learning now could make it easier to continue schooling if another disease outbreak occurs in the future.

Distance learning is a new form of education that could revolutionize the school system and change the way we perceive education. Allowing students to learn and do work at home would make education much easier for many in the country, and would remove many of the issues prevalent in the modern school system. While it may come with some drawbacks, distance learning will provide massive benefits to students in the long run, such as removing issues with transportation, decreasing the amount of time wasted, and preventing the spread of disease. The American public school system has long been criticized for being inefficient and out-of-date; distance learning may be just the thing to change that.