Education - Extract. Ep. #22: What might the lessons of the Pandemic be for a learning revolution?

Really big question, and the first thing that I, I want to say is that, um, I think we don't know yet. I think that's really important. One of the, the things that I think has been a product of that industrial moment of thinking about education is this quick harvest. Okay, what did we get out of it? All right, this is an industrial question, and it comes from a moment of looking at betterment, optimization, efficiency. And the education system, of course, has been a sort of a reflection of the factory and has adopted all sorts of of similar metaphors and protocols, bases, right? One of them has even been assuming that all children learn in the same way, which they don't. So that completely started by erasing the complexity of the children themselves, erasing the complexity of their teachers and their parents and their world. Right, it was extended all the way through. So the first thing I want to say is the fact of us actually not knowing yet what has changed reserves a place for unseen shifts that we don't— we won't— we may not recognize them in the way they play out in terms of the education system. They may play out in terms of the way that the next generation thinks about the planet or about each other or about their parents. Now, having said that, I think there are some really interesting things that came up. I have a bunch of kids, and one of the things that appeared very quickly was that we had a kid living with us who was about to graduate high school. And her graduation got canceled. And it was as though all of a sudden, this entire protocol of the culture got dismissed. And after telling this generation for the last, well, for generations actually, that this was the pinnacle of importance, that you should get good grades, your graduation is this big rite of passage. And then all of a sudden it was yanked and it was like, well, it's not that important, we can do other things. And to recognize the, actually the ripples of the way in which that message switch might actually start to switch other messages that they've been fed, I think is important. The big one, of course, is kids' relationship to technology and the Zoom classes and the, are you at home and being with family all of a sudden. Which for some people was amazing because they actually got to be with their kids and there was a new kind of relationship building. People saw what their children were learning and actually maybe how wonderful it was, but mostly how inane it was. And then for families that were having more strife at home, it was much worse. So I'm not gonna paint a rosy picture on that. The most important thing for me is that the rhythm was broken. That's the most important thing. The rhythm broke. We live our lives in rhythms, heartbeats, seasons, graduations, generations, when you eat a meal, when you go to work, when it's time for vacation, when— right? These rhythms broke. And so if you shift your relationship to time, all the other relationships shift. And while there's a big pull to go back to how things were, and structurally it's easy to kind of step into those old patterns, there's also a lived bodily memory of a moment when those rhythms were interrupted, and that didn't exist before. Just that the complexity that's in there when suddenly all the grown-ups were flipping out about running out of toilet paper, right? So that it was funny, but at the same time it was significant because they were recognizing supply chains. They were recognizing that the toilet paper did not actually just appear in the grocery store, and so all of a sudden there was actually more relational thinking happening. Was this a health epidemic? Was it economic? Was it cultural? Was it media? Was it technology? Is it history? Is it— right? So there's this multiple contextual process happening. So I'm going to throw all that up in the air and say the meta-messages got flipped around, and that is significant. Where it goes, I don't think we know yet.