Pandemic and American Education

March 7, 2020 and the word comes down from the school administration that the school is closing for the indefinite future because of the encroaching national and global pandemic.  It is 2:00 pm and school ends in 40 minutes and we will not be coming back for the rest of the school year. The disorientation is immense, and students express a mixed feel of exhilaration, fear, anxiety and unsettledness.

Why not feel a bit disoriented?  It is a living situation not faced by nearly every living person on the planet.  It is our 21^st century epidemic, bringing to all of us, social, political and economic upheaval and death.

Every aspect of what you do from here on out will be from a distance.  You will physically distance yourself from humanity and Teachers will distance themselves from their students.  It is called distance-learning and everything you as an educator have fashioned together in your bag of curriculum and experience and projects will have to be digitized and placed “online”.

The conveying of experiences, knowledge, understanding and problem-solving to students will now be done at a digital distance with technology, programs, multimedia tools, internet websites and interactive programs.  As a teacher you have passed completely through the looking-glass of education and find yourself in an alternative universe.  Ways of measuring learning will forever be masked behind a computer screen and true understanding defaults to a measure how self-driven student are now more than ever before.   

Not that students were not self-driven in the physical classroom with direct human to human contact, they were motivated but with a healthy dose of humanity.  Now students gather digitally for learning sake and for understanding.  Student motivation to access resources on the Internet and within computerized programs has never been more important.  In fact, in this alternative universe of school, motivated self-directed student learning has taken command like a coup takes over a government.  It is complete.  Now, those most motivated and supported with the greatest access to technology will be the most successful.

If American schools, over the century, have held our society together in a form delivering prescribed commonality of things learned, with a good dose of systematic segregation, then this digital divide will clearly separate us to a far greater extent than can be comprehended.  Access to technology will dictate who are the winners and who are the losers.  Access, support, specialized teaching and enriching opportunities will go to the most well connect and in America that usually means those at the top of the financial economy.