Damon,
Of course you can learn SOME of what it means to be a pastor at seminary.
You can learn it better from an accomplished Pastor.
We teach that all the time. We teach it over lunch. We teach it in the office. We teach it over dinner. We teach it by telling stories in the classroom. I learned a great deal from Derke Bergsma who told us stories, who stopped us in the middle of student sermons, who taught us or communicated to us a lot about pastoral ministry in ways that would be impossible by distance.
All of this can be done, better, by an apprenticed young man under the authority of his local church; being mentored by the Pastors, elders, and deacons on the "front line."
It's called mentoring and we do it every day, all day. There are things that our faculty teach our students, in person, in conversation, in internships, that they cannot put in a book (even though we do write quite a lot) and that can't be transmitted electronically.
All of which can be just as well, or better, learned under the leadership of a local church, with MUCH better accountability.
I don't know of ANY evidence suggesting that pastors trained by distance do better than those who are trained at an actual school. I haven't seen any such evidence in my experience.
I am not speaking of pastors in particular: I am speaking of things such as Church history, the Biblical Languages, etc., which are almost exclusively knowledge based classes, that would at many B & M seminaries be taught in monstrous classrooms of up to 100 people.
There indeed are studies that such knowledge is accumulated and integrated BETTER by those in an online environment (rather than having the huge distraction of other students talking, off topic discussions about what people did that weekend, etc.)
News: The Evidence on Online Education - Inside Higher Ed
This is why I use the surgical analogy. There are skills in medicine (and I guess law, even if Fred doubts it; we have 2-3 lawyers on campus who disagree with Fred) that cannot be communicated by a talking head on a screen. I've taught both ways. I know the limits of the medium.
Which is actually a teeny tiny percentage of your schooling. As I stated, all of the "theoretical" classes, such as biology, Anatomy, etc. a would be doctor can indeed take online. The "hands on" portion of a doctors training, would correlate to the small amount of classes in Seminary, such as Pastoral counseling or Homiletics, which are "hands on" as well.
However, with the Pastorate, this "hands on" portion of a young ministers training, can be just as well handled at the local church level, with the "head knowledge" or theoretical portion of it, being done through distance ed.
Read Polayni on the personal aspects of learning/knowing. Think about a luthier. The skill of making a violin or cello cannot be taught by a talking head. One has to apprentice. One has to be taken by the hand and learn by experience how to cut, shape, and assemble an instrument. At the same time there is theory involved. The same is true of surgery (I imagine). It's certainly true of the formation of pastors.
Neither can it be taught by a person standing directly in front of you. It is learned by doing.
A seminary is not just a place for disseminating information. It's a place for formation. Nor is it a substitute for the visible church. The church is ill-equipped to teach theory (because that's not the sort of institution the church is; it's not a school) but ministerial preparation requires BOTH theory and praxis. A good sem with dedicated, pastoral faculty is partim...partim - partly theoretical and partly practical.
The church is ill equipped to teach theory....but this can be learned by distance ed. The church is BETTER equipped, in my opinion, to teach practical application, and hands on learning. A church leadership group, with multiple elders, pastors, etc., training ONE or TWO young men, is much better than a single professor (who might have minimal pastoral experience) trying to train 20 or 30.
