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Remember that what's unfair and unreasonable in the treatment of school children during the pandemic was also unfair and unreasonable before the pandemic.
Remember that what's nonsensical during online lessons should also be considered as nonsensical in regular classrooms.
Remember that if it makes no sense and if it is unhealthy to require children to sit down in front of a screen for several hours, it made also no sense and it was also unhealthy to require children to do the same in front of a teacher in a regular classroom.
Our current circumstances should be an opportunity to rethink the divide between formal learning environments and the informal environments of homes and communities.
They should also be an opportunity to have conversations about what the role of teachers should be in environments in which the agency, humanity and capabilities of kids and their families are fully acknowledged, as well as of everyone at schools, including janitors.
But mostly, our current circumstances should be an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between our common held assumptions about how school should look like and the inequalities and injustices the pandemic brings to light.
Never forget how the pandemic makes clear that most of the truly essential and important jobs, aside from those of people working in the health sector, are not those of highly paid professionals, but those of the people growing food, cleaning, cooking, driving, etc., etc.
And never forget how the pandemic makes clear that no one can be truly safe unless we all take care of each other and unless everyone can have a home and food on the table, regardless of their productivity or job status.
Therefore, this pandemic is challenging us 1) to bring down hierarchies between the educated and the uneducated, between professionals and those who are insulted whenever they are called low skilled workers, and 2) to refuse individualized notions of well-being and merit.
And our learning environments at home and at school should reflect this.
Schools should be caring, respectful and diverse communities of equals, not places of ordered and silent classrooms, competition, grading, homogenization, rigid timetables, and rigid notions of how children should learn and what they should learn.
Hopefully, when the pandemic is over, more people will dare to imagine that schools could be different and more playful.
How do you design a school? by @irasocol https://medium.com/@irasocol/how-do-you-design-a-school-b96752932812
The Four A-s in Moments by @irasocol https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-four-a-s-in-moments-b07f6f04156c
School as an Extension of Home by @Arbay38 https://medium.com/@Arbay38/school-as-an-extension-of-home-c186c3432787
Want to design a school? Go to jail! by @teolol https://medium.com/@teolol/want-to-design-a-school-go-to-jail-6682a3f950dc
How I Visit a School: Talk to the Janitor First by @teolol https://medium.com/@teolol/how-i-visit-a-school-talk-to-the-janitor-first-c9f57b549ad9
