I am about one-fourth of the way into Jack Schneider’s and Jennifer Berkshire’s A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of Public School. As I experience one in three of my students in quarantine related to COVID-19, I am keenly aware of how limited computer-delivered education is absent immediate, in-person, teacher-student and student-student relationships.
Human beings grow and learn best in relationship, which should come as no surprise since humans are social beings.
And yet, as Schneider (no relation) and Berkshire so deftly explain, the likes US ed sec Betsy DeVos– who would like nothing more than to erase public education from existence– would just as soon also eliminate as many teachers as possible in favor of students interacting with machines– and all in the name of reducing human beings to “career ready” servers of the market. After all, machines are cheaper and cannot unionize, and a *successful* outcome is one that serves business and industry.
However, in this time of pandemic-induced, online-ed proliferation, it is the rare person who sees isolated students sitting in front of computer screens as pedagogically desirable. Having my students in quarantine connected to my classroom only via their Chromebooks is not an “answer” but a tolerated necessity during this COVID crisis, and it has me constantly trying to figure out ways to keep my students’ education afloat until next I see them in person– a “figuring out” that is tedious, time-consuming, and exhausting.
I am not saying I am against quarantining, but I sure do understand the push by some CONTINUE READING: A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog
