Education and Covid 19

I wrote a blog post on social distancing and having to work from home during Covid 19. I ended up in a live discussion with my friend Maurice Burke and his panel. There were a lot of points made about the virtual collapse of the world’s education system because of Covid 19. In short just telling students to study home is just as problematic as telling employees who have never worked from home, to suddenly do so. It’s a huge culture shift. However the problem is even larger than just one private enterprise struggling with this “sending people home to work” issue.

Kids will probably never want to go back to learning the way they were doing before (The classroom “chalk and board system”). Also the technology gap is still too huge for all students to be able to take advantage of the staying home and learning technique. Not all kids have access to technology nor wifi to do this properly. Added to the inability of the education system to effectively run this “study from home” plan will leave a lot of people at huge disadvantages later.

This overnight shift in working might stabalise for private enterprises, but would not be easy for government and school systems. There are too many factors, too many old school ways of doing things, too much confusion about policy and standardisation. It really does sound insurmountable. But while all of this is going on, we’re here home, with our kids trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Anyway this is my short short thoughts on the issue. You can view the livestream titled “Impact of Covid 19 on Education” I was in last night here: