Remote Learning Has Been An Abysmal Failure
By: Justin Cole Adams
Tags: Students, Remote Learning, 2020, Education, Education Reform

With all of this in mind, in relation to my mom’s students, their inability to perform and get the work done being assigned them is completely understandable.

To my mom, a highly-educated Gen-X woman, who went to an all-girls Catholic high school in Jamaica and always prided herself on being an academic steward, she’s not used to dealing with “puny humans” (in Hulk voice).

She’s been a teacher for almost a decade. Her job is excruciating and soul-sucking, taking into consideration how measly her pay is (and we live in New York). She taught in the South Bronx for a period of time, probably the most violent neighborhood in New York City. Fights breaking out in the hallway, undisciplined students, students that come from broken homes and/or live life out in “the streets”, gang violence an imminent threat semi-frequently. Push comes to shove her down a hill decorated with spikes, an egregious dismissal from her position left her unemployed for a few months, collecting benefits (she’d find a new position in November 2016, coincidentally right before the Orange Man himself rose to office.)

My mom endured a lot and made it through to tell her story. I heard the horror, and could only express my condolences. Putting that aside, I know she loves interacting with her students, and being a motherly figure to them gives her a lot of joy deep down.

If only her dedication to her craft was reflected in her annual salary…

Modern-day teachers are given very little rope to work with. The creativity they can infuse into their lessons is stifled by bureaucratic overhead. Their pay increase stagnates over the year, if at all (it coincides with the decades-long stagnation in wage growth that most American workers have become victim to.)

On top of that, their means of disciplining students for misconduct are limited to a stern warning, changing their seats as if it’s a backwards, upside-down game of Musical Chairs and sending them off to the principals office, for yet another stern talking.

Teachers are one of many key players that are blind to the big picture in frame because fractured sunlight is reflecting off of it.

Schools are like places of worship, but there’s a different type of “God”, holy prophet unifying students in “prayer.” It’s a prayer built around teamwork, cooperation and community, not overbearing memorization of facts that you can pull from an encyclopedia.

It sounds like part of a speech from a promising electoral candidate, but Nick Hanauer is right in his op-eds for the Atlantic that strong middle-class families, collaborating together and advocating for their “unionized” interests with their solid purchasing power is what made the education system in America thrive at one point.

That’s why parents investing in participating in the PTA group at their children’s schools is a wise investment still. Teachers are parents; obviously, they can and will come in many different shapes and forms. When the youth are educated properly, in a digital space or in a brick-and-mortar building, the wealth that’s inevitably produced will trickle down back into the community that allowed said wealth to be built.

In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

Only the elites that Hanauer is in the circles of, like Bill Gates are proponents of slapping a few Benjamins onto the deepening flesh wounds of any widespread problem affecting the masses (like COVID-19).

They are also proponents of what Hanauer has the coined the term for: “educationism”. The premise: if we educate more people, they will have more knowledge, more ideas on more subject matters injected into their brain, which assumes they will automatically become valuable in the market and later on produce great innovations and inventions.

What makes this assumption miss the mark is that it fails to distinguish acquisition in skills from acquisition in knowledge, and bundles the two together as if they’re the same thing. Knowledge does not always directly lead towards possessing applicable skills

None of this directly relates to remote learning, but these are burning issues that this pandemic is unveiling, issues that have floundered on the sidelines for too long, and for which solutions are going to have to be expedited, because the world we will exist in 2021 and beyond will not wait up.

The exponential growth in newer technological advancements, notwithstanding AI will be overwhelming as they pile in. We will need more people in the workforce to be competent in using certain technologies. “Learn to Code” is a trendy hashtag for a good reason.