Education is extremely important in the development of individuals. Education is what creates individuals into contributing members of society. It is important for individuals to be provided a great education so that they can become capable citizens. Currently that education is being provided by traditional schooling; students go to a school building and a class of students gets taught by a teacher in person. Some schools have begun implementing classes that can be taken from home, such as online classes or video conferences. Distance learning will not benefit students because the students will not be able to pay full attention to their classes at home, are not able to develop as good of a relationship with their teachers, and will cheat more and with greater ease.

Distance learning will not benefit students because the students will not be able to pay full attention to their classes at home. With traditional schooling students are taught in a distraction free environment, the school building. This makes it much easier to educate the students and teach more difficult subjects that require greater concentration. Teachers are able to easily regain the attention of distracted students and eliminate those distractions. If classes were held online and students took the classes from home, many more students would not be paying attention to their classes because of the multitude of distractions available at their fingertips. Many students, myself included, struggle to do school work at home because of the many distractions. Students would be taking the classes on their own computer which can easily be navigated away from the class. Students also have their phone near them with no consequences for taking it out and checking it which greatly disrupts the learning of those students.

Distance learning will not benefit students because the students are not able to develop as good of a relationship with their teachers. At traditional schools, students talk to their teachers on a daily basis and form great bonds with their teachers. Meanwhile with online schools, that ability is removed.

In online schools students will not have the opportunity to talk to their teacher face to face much, if at all, and even if students are able to communicate with their online teachers, it can still never be better than a face to face conversation in real life. A face to face conversation in real life allows people to connect and get a greater sense of understanding of the conversation and the person, something that is unable to be replicated online. This will lead less students developing bonds with their teachers, and of the students that do develop bonds with their teachers, the bonds will not be as if they were from a traditional school. When a student develops a bond with a teacher, it makes it easier for that student to ask the teacher questions or to ask for help. The teacher can also provide valuable connections to the student. In life, there is a great saying that is it's not what you know, but who you know. What that means is that in life connections to people are very important. Connections can provide opportunities that would have never been possible without those connections. Many teachers provide students with great opportunities that the student would not have been presented with without their connection to their teacher. With online classes, students will not be able to get those needed connections from their teachers unlike in traditional schools.

Distance learning will not benefit students because the students will cheat more and with greater ease. Currently in traditional schools cheating is a large problem. During assessments students will look at another students test and copy answers down, try to take out their phone to search answers, or try to talk to other students to get help. With online classes it will be even easier for students to cheat on assignments and assessments. Students will have access to a wide variety of resources at their homes that can not be limited. While it is possible to restrict some cheating on online testing through programs designed to not allow students to cheat, those programs only work to prevent cheating from that one device. While taking an assessment at home a student could easily take out their phone and search for an answer online without the program on their computer having any knowledge of that happening. This is easily prevented at traditional schools by a proctor supervising testing, but is not preventable for online classes.

Some people may argue that distance learning makes classes and learning more accessible, but because the quality of education goes down so greatly with distance learning, the cons far outweigh the pros. Many institutions will learn this as they experiment with distance learning in light of recent epidemics such as covid-19. Distance learning will not benefit students because of more distractions, students not being able to develop as good of relationships with teachers compared to traditional schools, and a greater amount of students cheating and not actually learning.