Defying Gravity


Let me start by saying I don’t know how much normal changes as a direct result of the pandemic. When I look to history for how things may fall out, what strikes me is that by historical standards Covid-19 is relatively mild. A plague in Athens in the 5th century killed a third of the city’s population. The Black Death killed 30-60% of Europe’s population, and perhaps 20% of the world population. 

That’s not to minimize coronavirus, and there are still considerable uncertainty bars around the exact scale of the exact virulence of Covid, never mind the next pandemic. But, what we see in history is that life goes on: survivors pick up the pieces and do the best they can. As a result, if we do see a change from normal, I think it will be a result of psychological factors, perhaps combined with the policy response, rather than the pandemic itself. The biggest direct changes may be from having proof of concept: remote work and other experiments have been forced on governments, businesses, and individuals, and some of them will find new ways of doing things that they prefer.

With that caveat, I think the education space may be a very interesting one. I’m struck that we’ve seen very different behaviour from school teachers and university professors. Professors have charged online, offering courses and continuing to teach: school teachers have largely thrown up their hands and not continued to teach. I’m not sure I see that as sustainable, at least for the later grades. There’s no reason high school teachers couldn’t deliver courses online, and as this continues I think pressure will build on them to do so. 

That said, the research is also clear that people taking classes online learn less, so I don’t think we’re going to see a full-scale shift to online courses at either level. I do think we may see increased flexibility at the margin; one could imagine one style of course where an elite teacher delivers it to a large number of kids virtually, perhaps with the kids still in their local classroom overseen by a local teacher as well who is effectively a teaching assistant for the class. Courses in person could be supplemented by pre-recorded videos, in the same way vidcruiter uses recorded interviews to supplement live ones. I think we’ll see a lot more ingenuity in classrooms, learning from what has already happened in schools in the developing world due to resource constraints. 

How about you? Feel free to talk more about education, or take a different topic!

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