Will post-pandemic school be different? The case against.
Recent posts have looked at how the fall 2020 semester is likely to play out, and key school needs for re-opening. In this post I’m going to look at post-pandemic school with a wider lens—and as you’ll see, a fairly skeptical one with regards to the question of whether school as we know it will be forever changed.
It’s not hard to find articles suggesting that school will never again be the same as it was before the pandemic. Other articles and op-eds take the view that schools should use this opportunity to change. Even articles that are more measured in their predictions tend to focus on likely changes.
But could they all be wrong? What is the probability that in a year or two school will look almost exactly like…what it was in January 2020?
I’ve been thinking about this question quite a bit since reading I Predict Your Predictions Are Wrong, a long (and not education-focused) commentary in The Atlantic about how past events were incorrectly predicted to have a long-term impact on society. From the opening:
The past few weeks have, understandably, confronted us with an especially loud chorus of chronocentric voices claiming that we are on the cusp of unprecedented change. Academics, intellectuals, politicians, and entrepreneurs have made sweeping pronouncements about the transformations that the pandemic will spur.
After surveying a number of prominent economists and historians, The New York Times declared that we are about to witness the “end of the world economy as we know it.” Proclaiming the demise of the “neoliberal era,” one left-wing writer argued, “Whatever you might be thinking about the long-term impacts of the coronavirus epidemic, you’re probably not thinking big enough.” At Bloomberg View, a right-wing investor asserted that the pandemic is “driving the last nail into the coffin of the globalists.”
Will those developments come to pass? The article points to historical comparisons to suggest that they are unlikely.
Near the end of World War I…”a novel virus sped around the world, infecting hundreds of millions of people. The 1918 influenza ultimately killed more than 50 million.
At the time, it must have seemed as though life could never go back to normal. Why would anyone ever again risk contracting a disease just to share a drink with friends or listen to some music?
But the devastation of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic was quickly followed by a manic flight into sociability. The Roaring Twenties saw a flowering of parties and concerts. The 1918 virus killed more people than the deadliest war humanity had hitherto experienced, but it did not reduce humanity’s determination to socialize.”
Does that counter-example (and others in the article) demonstrate that permanent change won’t happen? No. But the reasons why such changes didn’t happen is as compelling as the fact that they didn’t happen—and these apply to education.
Predictions of change “focus too much on the (perceived) irrationality of present realities, and too little on what would need to happen to put something better in place… many institutions persist despite deep flaws because those who would benefit from change can’t work together effectively or agree on a replacement. Just about everybody agrees that the UN Security Council is, in its current form, incapable of keeping the peace in the world’s most imperiled regions, such as Syria. But because different governments have different visions of how the council should be reformed—and because those that have a permanent seat are reluctant to dilute their influence—the system keeps trudging along.
Whether or not you believe that public education suffers from “deep flaws,” the fact is that every facet of public education exists for a reason. You may not agree with the reasoning, of course. But, for example, seat-time regulations exist because policymakers believe (or believed) that such mechanisms were a reasonable approximation of student activity that could be demonstrated and reported on, and used for funding determinations. State assessments exist because federal lawmakers believed that some sort of national-level accountability was needed—and they existed in many states before federal requirements because state legislators sought a level of transparency and accountability for schools in their states.
For every aspect of education that one person might like to change, another person will want it to stay the same. Maybe that person wanting stasis feels that the current system is better for students. Maybe they are scared of losing their job or influence. Maybe they believe that the desired change won’t be successful. Maybe they’re lazy and don't want to put in the extra effort. The reasons why they will resist change matter less than the fact that someone will resist change—and those someones are often in positions of influence.
For every change that education reformers seek, somebody has pushed back or, at least, dragged their heels. The question for those suggesting that this time is different: if someone opposed this change pre-Covid, why will they support it post-Covid?
The next post will explore arguments for why this time may, in fact, be different.