This article presents the author's view that online education mistakes information for education and training for teaching. He presents a historical look at "distance learning" as the original correspondence courses offered through the mail, and he observes that the past and present technologies were missing the main piece of teaching: the "co-presence of teacher and student," for which there can be no substitute. He notes that online instruction is not logical presentation of materials, but rhetorical presentation. The author describes the two classroom teaching models--the lecture and the discussion--and using these models the teacher and students have a common share in the subject matter. The use of online components in classroom teaching, he contends, is a pretense at conducting education. It is instead what he terms educational management--with students as consumers who, immersed in an electronic sense of the world, find themselves comfortable with anything reduced to a technological format. While the author has no argument against technology, he does argue against online instruction as a basis or partial basis of education.