Let me tackle first the Education sector and all entities related to this sector. Let us start with schools – dilemma facing the community as a whole. Answers to this Education Dilemma lies within the system and how we spin it around during a pandemic for the participants is going to be my focus here.
Looking for answers
Answers lie in the way we have built schools and the way in which we can make it work during a pandemic.
The first and foremost thing to understand is that the schools are built to provide maximum social interaction. The effort now has to be to remodel them for social distancing.
At least, understanding the problem, we are half way there to a possible solution. But the players who are participating in the social interactions are teachers, students, social administrators, cafeteria personnel, transportation personnel and parents.
Now it is important to understand the bottom-line requirement for education. It all needs a teacher, a student and a curriculum to teach. It also needs the placements of these two players in such a way the curriculum can be taught. However, the problem is aggravated by the requirement that parents need to be somewhere working while students were being taught.
I don’t claim to have a solution or an answer that can work with every parent, student, teacher and curriculum. The solution however lies in peeling of layers after layers of social interactions we have built over the past century when mass education took the center stage to meet the requirement of industrial revolution.
We don’t need to adhere to the same goal of mass production as the 21st century is bringing in knowledge revolution. We need to find ways to adjust and we are already doing it knowingly or unknowingly. It is now left in the hands of administrators and policy makers to reinvent schools for 21st century and pandemic is showing a way to it. It is advocating social distancing, but looking back, you would realize that a customized learning had already introduced social distancing. So embrace the social distancing rather than yelling about it.
Shift the school paradigm
Let us keep few of these disconnected thoughts in focus and then make a connection to see how we can look for answers to education dilemma.
- Thousands of listeners listen to radios while carrying out their work or exercise or whatever activities that they are doing at that moment.
- During pre-mass education, only elite were able to get higher education.
- Many of the skills remained in the family as parents passed on their skills to their family members, but sadly we bracket them in hand-crafters.
- After the industrial revolution took a firm hold on the way the civilized societies grew, we became dependent on the solutions provided by the revolution without realizing alternative ways of finding solutions.
- Many forms of treatments got developed along the path of de-toxification to remove the excesses introduced by the excess consumption of the goods and services consumed produced by the industrial revolution.
- A popular movement took hold recently, promoting living off the grid, seems to show that given the right amount of intent and capacity anything is possible.
- Bitcoin economy started taking a foothold as a parallel economy without a need for mediating institutions like banks and governments.
- A final thought, internet created new culture of social interaction that was not localized to a community or a nation, but crisscrossed geographical, cultural, racial, ethnical and religious boundaries.
Now let us see whether we can see a bubbling up effect of these thoughts that could provide an answer to the current education dilemma.
Few things that we can gather are most self-evident:
- We build systems and we destroy them
- We keep using the new tools and skills to social gather in ways we could not have imagined
Putting these two thoughts together, the answer lies in not wanting the same structure to remain to embrace social distancing, but create new structure to not only embrace social distancing, but also look for ways to socially gather better than before.
We cannot win Pandemic as an individual, we need to win this as a community.