The COVID-19 pandemic and the added value of the school



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## The COVID-19 pandemic and the added value of the school

06/05/2020 |
SCP

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* [![ opinio-reina-ferrandez IMG_20200414_093221](/com/investigacio/arxiu/noticies/2020/5/opinio-reina-ferrandez/IMG_20200414_093221.jpg)](#)

The other day, at the beginning of all this madness, one of the shop assistants at the supermarket where we usually go said to me: "You see, I have my daughter at home with a mountain of homework that even I don't understand and I'm not paid to be a teacher”. This devastating comment reflects a bitter reality that forces us to seriously consider what we are doing from an educational point of view to mitigate the effects that this situation of confinement is having and will have on our children. The school exists because it is necessary, because it provides an added value to the academic curriculum that goes beyond mere theoretical content. This added value has to do with practical knowledge, socialisation, play, teamwork, and knowing how to live in society. In short, it has to do with the development of the key competencies that are so much debated today and so difficult to bring into our classrooms.

The data shown by the Unesco on its website regarding the closure of schools as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are terrible: more than one and a half billion students remain at home. That is more than 91% of the world's students, 91% of the society of the future.

This closure is not only clearly affecting student education, but also increases inequalities, as not all families have access to the necessary technology and, without technology, they cannot access the Internet to be able to connect and follow academic activities. Likewise, many families do not have the necessary knowledge to be able to guide their children, so the loss for these groups may be irreparable.

In this sense, some initiatives are being carried out, such as freeing up the domestic networks so that those with fewer resources can access the Internet or creating human chains to get their homework done. But these are not enough. Digitalisation is a great advance but, on its own, it does not solve the problems. We need professionals behind it, so that the gap that this stage is going to represent does not have an irreversible impact on the youngest.

And this leads us to another inequality to be taken into account that has to do with age and the added value of the school. Within the school age, the younger the child, the more important life in the classroom is for learning to relate, while access to the Internet is more complicated. In other words, with confinement, children will not be able to interact normally with their peers, and will also need their parents to access content, homework and school activities. And once accessed, they are going to need constant supervision; not exhaustive control, but supervision. And that, again, is not easy. Without going any further, in the home of essential workers, this care cannot be the same and, in some cases, may even be impossible. In Austria, for example, this situation has been resolved, not without criticism, by keeping schools and nurseries open only for the pupils of these essential workers.

Here again we come back to the idea of the added value and irreparable loss that can result from doing nothing to try to make up for the absence of all those essential school activities, beyond sending homework.

This new way of working demands the students to be autonomous and self-sufficient, and this confinement has forced them to become autonomous overnight, since those children who have not been able to even choose the colour of the cover of their notebooks are now being asked to regulate their time, to read the contents or to get by their own in order to understand them, via a forum with the teachers, via families or via YouTube video tutorials. But, in any case, we are leaving all the responsibility in their hands. And this affects the little ones in a very special way.

Thus, this assumption of autonomy that could, and should, be possible in the most mature students, i.e., the one in the non-compulsory stages, cannot be taken for granted in the rest of the stages. That is, virtual classrooms, with contents and activities to be developed during confinement, may be sufficient, temporarily, in more adult students, with other resources within their reach that may somehow replace classroom attendance. But in the school stages we need something else, we need digital resources to be used in a different way, we need innovative ideas that help us get as close as possible to school situations that are not about content, but about social skills. We need to contextualize learning in another way, to use this scenario as an opportunity, to link the contents to the reality we are experiencing so that the youngest can understand it. We need to support the families, provide them with guidelines and resources because they are our hands, eyes and ears during these days, and although it is true that they are the legally responsible ones, it is no less true that we are the experts. We are not in a normal situation; we cannot continue as if nothing is happening. The reality is being hard. It is not about hiding it, it is about understanding it and helping people to understand it.

We are in a time of uncertainty where we do not know when or how we will return to normal life. It is possible that it will take time to have a remedy for this disease, and it is even possible that next autumn we will find ourselves in a situation similar to that of now. We, education professionals, must train and work now on developing new ideas to harness the potential of information and communication technologies (ICT) and take them beyond what we did with them before confinement. It is in our hands that COVID-19 will only affect health. It has now caught us off guard, but we no longer have an excuse. In the words of Michael Fullan, in a tweet on 6 April: "The *urgency* is *COVID-19*. Think anew about education, focus on those that need the help, while all of us take 2020 to create a better system".

**Reina Ferrández Berrueco, expert on Research and Diagnostic Methods in Education at the Universitat Jaume I.**

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