Reformatted, emphasis mine:
What does education look like in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic? At the K-12 level, you’ve got problems. At the collegiate level, you’ve got existential problems. School is out for the year in most locales. More innovative districts are retooling like crazy and trying to do online classes. Parents are looking for cheap or free resources to do the job and keep their kids occupied during our enforced isolation. Now that we’re out the money and have to take care of the kids, reassessment is going to happen.
In short, we are all homeschoolers now.
Expect that to be much more the case next school year, as enough parents who were forced to try it either a) like it and decide to keep this knowledge train rolling or b) don’t believe the schools are safe enough to send their kids back into and so suck it up. This will create knock-on problems for public schools certainly, and also for private schools.
Kids go to school for six-plus hours a day, but a lot of that time is wasted. In most cases, you could run through the lessons in about two hours. Parents are seeing that now.
The pandemic quarantine is showing us that schooling is basically state- or parent-sponsored babysitting with some ABCs, 123s, dodgeball, and the prom thrown in. This highly credentialed child care costs taxpayers a lot of money. So long as things kept trucking along, most of us were not of the mood to too closely scrutinize these expenses. But now that we’re out the money and have to take care of the kids, reassessment is going to happen.
-Jeremy Lott (We Are All Homeschoolers Now)
(H/T: The American Spectator)
Note:
TMEW and I are experiencing this right now with the Grandson. True, it is only nursery school that he was in but because he has an IEP due to issues at birth, the local District is legally required to provide him, even at his young age, materials and assistance to continue to furnish services in the areas of speech and occupational therapy. The lady who heads up this area has been OUTSTANDING in getting materials to us, is remaining in constant phone / email / videoconference touch with us and the Grandson in teaching one-on-one lessons. The speech and OT teachers are also adapting and trying hard as well – having created technical materials for IT staff during my career, I know how hard it can be to “do things on the fly” once you’ve created a set of materials. But, you get it done and they are as well.
Given that he is a “digital baby”, he doesn’t see all this as being out of the ordinary. All three of us have our own digital devices and consider them just a normal part of life.
What MAY be different for us, however, is that we are former daycare owner/operators and TMEW is a credential Early Childhood and Elementary Ed teacher. When she became ill years ago, she swore that she had “lost her touch” and would not teach again. Even as I brought up story after story of how Government Schools are acting against parental wills and outlooks.
Heh! What I have seen is an awakening of that exceptional ability in her again, so we do have an advantage that many others don’t.
All that said, I do agree with the above. Just as bloggers have turned the world of journalism upside down and showing that the “elite”, even with high credentials, aren’t always as informative as those that just start writing. I have a MS in Comp Sci but I quickly learned, when back at Digital Equipment, there were those that didn’t even finish high school that could code rings around me.
It’s a case of “the only people who have a monopoly on good ideas are those with good ideas” – titles, credentials, and degrees don’t matter. I am betting that while some parents will be QUITE happy to return to the time before Kung Flu, some others are going to decided that they LIKE doing this homeschooling – and that they may well be better at it for THEIR child than union teachers.
UPDATE: you might like reading this as well: Coronavirus quarantine will bust homeschooling myths, education expert claims
