Zoe Weil is a blogger for Psychology Today and she has been writing weekly posts about COVID-19. We’re sharing them here. We hope they are helpful to you during this pandemic.
Promising to solve all our problems is surely hubris, but transforming schooling comes close to being a panacea for the world’s ills, and there’s no better time than the present to envision and plan for post-pandemic schools.
Some may think it’s too soon to talk about what schools might look like on the other side of COVID-19. After all, teachers, children, and families need support for remote learning during the pandemic right now. But if we don’t talk about what schooling could be – how transforming educational approaches would be great for kids, great for teachers and families, great for communities, and great for the world – we won’t pursue fresh ideas or adopt new frameworks when kids return to their school buildings.
Just as we’re paying a heavy price for not heeding warnings and changing our food systems (which likely would have prevented COVID-19 as well as several past epidemics), we will continue to pay the price for not using the time and insight that this pandemic affords us to consider how our educational system could be so much more relevant, engaging, and meaningful.
In fact, given that the educational system lies at the root of so many other societal systems that we’ve created, failing to take this opportunity to examine schooling and transform it wisely means failing to effectively address every other problematic system that emerges from “educated” minds. Our political, economic, energy, healthcare and production systems, just to name a few, could be dramatically improved by a generation that was simply educated differently.
