Every sector that had previously been resistant to the internet (healthcare, education, law, finance, government itself) has now flipped to remote-first.
This is a response to Einat Wilf, who writes,
Many of us have been forced to homeschool our children. In doing so, some of us have been realizing a parenting fantasy or living a parenting nightmare, or both. Either way, we’ve become aware of the many ways in which teaching and learning can take place at home. Even many adults have had time to pursue the wealth of excellent learning materials available for free or limited cost—including classes and lectures from the world’s best universities.
I think that the future in many of these areas will be a blend of approaches from the pre-virus era and the virus era.
And if the government schools should self-destruct in the process, so be it.
I appreciate Kling’s optimism. If government schools self-destruct, I imagine what replaces them will be an improvement for children, for parents, and for society.
The pessimist in me would bet on the status quo winning out in K-12. In the next ten years, some form of radical change seems inevitable. Hopefully, they are positive changes, like more innovative schooling.
The virus is providing opportunity to families to explore alternatives to public schools, but there are several other forces affecting families’ education decision making.
First, with President-elect Biden jumping on the libertarians’ jihad on nice neighborhoods bandwagon, newly married couples and young families will face different trade-off calculations in housing decisions. Paying top dollar for that house in a good school’s catchment area may no longer seem like a good bet if the nice neighborhoods that they in are destroyed with a flood of high-density low-rises. And the quality of the school itself will be degraded as the exclusive population of higher income parents who tend to invest time and energy in their children’s education is diluted by lower income families who demand more expensive remedial services, language translation, etc., and bring the attitude that it is the school’s responsibility alone to educate their children. And schools prioritize the welfare of the latter over the former. The former type of family may well choose to live further away from urban areas in remote gated communities, to telecommute, and invest in private education alternatives.
The private schools alternative as traditionally understood may not benefit much from the virus. President-elect Biden is fully committed to Tyler Cowen’s stakeholder capitalism scheme to destroy the 401k investment strategy to accumulating wealth by saving and investing. Cowen and Biden want corporate earnings to go to SJW subsidies rather than be returned to investors. With this avenue to wealth accumulation destroyed, many more families will be unable to afford private tuition. This too will boost the home-schooling and related education alternatives.
And President-elect Biden has pretty much promised open borders, partly on the expectation that it will be primarily people from Central America arriving to turn Texas blue. However, Texas has been corrupted from within by its major urban areas running up huge debts and making extravagant California-style spending. The days of good Texas public schools are numbered. The arriving immigrants are more likely to be Muslims fleeing Africa and the Arab world. And more and more cities will have increasing numbers of madrasas reducing public school enrollment. The great diversity of Islamic schools in Houston gives a peek into the future. Houston has Islamic schools operated by the Islamic Society of Greater Houston under the name Darul Arqam Schools, and the Islamic Education Center operates the Al-Hadi School of Accelerative Learning, also has an independent Islamic school system, the Imam Academy.
The virus definitely has help in taking down government schools.
Creating a “pod” or bubble has been touted as a small-scale solution to the presumed lack of centralized schooling this fall (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/parenting/school-pods-coronavirus.html) but it seems to me that this is just the beginning of the advantage of pods. Eliezer Yudkowsky writes eloquently on a related subject (modular houses): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cmiRk9XtT9Psnd3Yr/movable-housing-for-scalable-cities
“Benefit #3: Friends living near each other.
All sufficiently tight clusters of friends can find a set of empty foundations, rent them, and live literally next door to each other.
We could have neighbors again.
We could have tribes again.
Yes yes, I know, you’re thinking of that one person who’s friends with a bunch of your friends but who you don’t want on the same block as you. But really, human beings have been living in tribes for a while. You can probably work it out. Many people could benefit a lot from living in close proximity to fifty people whose company you can tolerate… It could give us back something human that we lost, and start to make headway against lives that are _sad_, never mind the poverty.”
Probably more online in the future. Often easier.
But egads, real-world social interaction is a positive too.
public schools will be given every advantage to prevent their self destruction. E.g., a judge in Maryland rules “WHEREAS, it would damage the image and credibility of public school administrators and teachers’ unions if private schools succeeded with in-person learning this fall…”
https://twitter.com/mymcmedia/status/1289348541043945474
sorry, I retract the above. I was misled about the section I quoted; it is a tendentious reading of the directive and does not appear therein
Thanks for the correction. I wish more people online were like you.