The data on the Coronavirus pandemic is in. It is no more deadly than any previous flu season. Moreover, the severe and unprecedented lockdown measures were misguided, considering that countries that relied on building herd immunity, like Sweden, witnessed no greater death toll than countries with the strictest lockdown procedures. In fact, it seems that the cool-headed approach of Swedish medical experts yielded the best results.
The crisis influenced almost every sphere in the world, even educational one. In the article find ideas on the issue!
The Burden of Hysteria
The final blow to the inappropriate societal response comes in the form of antibody studies, revealing that the infection rate is at least 50 times higher than previously claimed. At first glance, you would think this is bad, but you would be wrong. The more people already have developed antibodies, the lower the mortality rate. This puts COVID-19 withing the 0.1% – 0.2% mortality range. In other words, your regular flu season. However, the institutional panic itself created more deaths than would have otherwise occurred.
Essentially, what we have witnessed with the Coronavirus epidemic is a crisis of perception. What was in previous decades and centuries not even named other than the “flu,” was suddenly precisely named, tested, systematically monitored, and relentlessly reported by all media.
In the Aftermath
Except for the ultra-rich elites, who got even richer during this pandemic, this crisis of perception will be felt for years to come. Millions of people have claimed unemployment, and thousands of small businesses are permanently shattered despite the emergency stimulus injections.
Nonetheless, there is a silver lining to all of this, as one crisis of perception reveals our underlying assumptions on the nature of our institutions. The most important one being the institution of education.
Education is still lauded as the ultimate social signaling. Without college, many people would perceive you as lesser than, even if they would never say it out loud. We are all immersed in the credentials way of thinking. The more credentials you have, the greater is your social status. Only large sums of money would save your social status, absent of proper credentials.
The question we failed to ask is the following – is our society wealthier and better if there are more credentialed people with university diplomas?
Faulty Inertia of History
To answer that question, we must take a big-picture look at education. It all started with the Prussian model of education in the late 18th century. Its purpose was the mass production of obsequious bureaucrats, soldiers, and other apparatchiks of the state. To this day, almost all nations follow it with a few extra tweaks. However, the fundamental flaw remains embedded within it – ignoring the coherence-interference problem of learning – meaning that same educational content has a different cognitive impact on different students. More importantly, the Prussian model ignores the well-acknowledged fact that learning must be pleasant and self-directed to hold beyond a couple of months. This is one of the reasons why knowledge retention rates are so notoriously poor within such a system.
The Coronavirus crisis revealed that much of schooling is busywork for teachers, contractors, and administrators:
- Large, expensive buildings that constantly need to be refurbished and maintained.
- The extremely ineffective teaching method of talking to a large group of students as they can read the same content from textbooks in front of them.
- Delivery that is not customized for each student, which any online learning platform could easily accomplish.
This creates a massively expensive, inefficient, non-interactive, pipeline of learning. But it is not so much learning as it is listening to à reproduction à forgetting until the next exam. The only creative respite a student would have is when he/she is an essay writer.
Its flaws are all clear to see, but the historic inertia of the previous institutional setup is simply too powerful to stop. Until events like Coronavirus give us pause. Although inefficient at what it’s supposed to do, making students successful instead of crippled with debt and unable to gain successful employment, the current model is quite lucrative for the school industry. Colleges, in particular, gain much from the continuously enforced social signaling that without college, one has no chance to succeed in life.
Coronavirus crisis just might be enough to awaken a sufficient critical mass of people to begin the gradual change outside or parallel to the woefully outdated and draining traditional education system. The changes need to be done – we want it or not!
In my opinion, online education is good for adult students but not for kids. Children always need a peer group and a teacher who instills discipline, thanks to which pupils can learn independently in the future.