It's time to take the negatives of online school seriously
My discussion with an educator, and additional thoughts
As the omicron wave hits, I have seen more and more people demand that school stays online at every level. In BC, it is only universities that have done so, as the province rightfully decided that children’s and teenagers’ mental health and literacy are in more danger than they are from the coronavirus. Instead of advocating for a better healthcare system, or to end the austerity when it comes to funding hospitals, some demand that we simply keep everyone at home; from school, that is. We are still free to go to the mall.
I spoke to a high school educational aid, Michael (name changed to respect anonymity)* who works at his school’s learning resource center. Michael works with students who have mainly cognitive and learning special needs. Because he himself has a physical disability that places him in BC’s “clinically vulnerable” category, I wanted to discuss with him balancing the need for quality education and teen mental health with looking out for other clinically vulnerable people during the pandemic.
When I asked Michael what impacts he has felt as an educator during this time, his first point did not concern how in-person learning would impact his well-being but doing his job online. “The first thing I can think of feeling is exhaustion,” Michael said. “You’re staring at a screen for seven to eight straight hours. That’s a lot more tiring than most people think it is, initially.”
In March 2020 until June 2020 with fully online learning, Michael was on a computer until five pm on Monday through Friday and felt tired and worn down. He noticed this feeling among the students as well. “A lot of people felt the exhaustion of being online,” he said.
Further, Michael added, online learning exacerbated the inequalities already present at the school. “It’s not an even playing field,” he explained. “At least when they’re in person, they appear to be on the same level as everyone else. They have the same access to the same things.”
Online, Michael added, can be difficult for students from low-income backgrounds who lack access to necessary equipment for online schooling: a household of four may have one computer with everyone needing to use it, for instance. He also expressed concern for children with difficult home life and the privacy invasions brought about by live-learning in their homes.
Michael’s school returned to in-person learning, and I was curious as to how he felt attending as a disabled person. But Michael felt confident returning. “When our school’s safety measures came out, I showed one of my nurses, and she said you’re fine to go back.”
The school, Michael said, had good measures in place: there were separate entrances for different grades and cohorts. The grades were on different levels, and had different lunch times. Desks were continuously wiped down.
“We had a share of cases, but they were very minor,” Michael said. “Eventually, people started to worry more about regular school things, and weren’t freaking out about COVID or transmission.” The issue, for Michael, is how schools take the needed precautions; not how many cases of COVID there are in the province. So why do we think about going into lockdown mode instead of making the most efforts we can to keep schools open?
This is not normal
Like Michael, I have shared concerns about school closures at all levels, including my own. Like with elementary and high school students, remote learning has deeply impacted the mental health of college students for the worse, including increases suicidal ideation. I myself have lost people to suicide and drug overdose in a way that has, frankly, alarmed me. And they all tell one truth: people are worse off when they are isolated. They are anxious when they keep receiving changing commands and contradictory information, and when there is no end in sight to the alleviation of these problems.
Vaccination initially provided this end but has since disappointed due to the rapid spread of omicron in spite of mass vaccination. In BC, we are receiving numerous alerts to get our third shots, but with no promise that doing so will ease these destabilizing restrictions. Further, we have been bound by the same restrictions we had when vaccinations did not exist. Supposedly, the vaccines prevent the risk of getting and spreading the virus, as well as preventing serious illness. But we have made our educational policies as though none of this was true. Peoples’ frustration is understandably exacerbated, and it would not surprise me if public trust in health authorities is eroded even further because of this.
What talking to Michael revealed to me was something very simple: there are ways of saving education. Yes, there may be extra measures that need to be taken if that must be the case. But education is worth saving. It is worth taking risks for.
Either way, we are taking risks. By having an indefinite period where we all live online, we are doing long-lasting damage to students’ mental health and learning outcomes. Students pay exorbitantly high tuition while being confined to learning through methods they could use to learn for free on YouTube.
However, this risk is not the same post-vaccination if we are to believe what any health authorities have to say. That vaccinated (and unvaccinated!) people get sick from omicron is not the same as mass death. If the concern is that students may become infected and pass it on to someone more vulnerable, the mass-vaccination program would diminish that risk.
The concern seems to be overwhelming the hospitals, but it is simply not the case that people of university age or younger, on campuses with extremely high vaccination rates, are the ones clogging up the ICUs.
More importantly, however, this point obscures the real problem. The government has had two years to do something about hospital capacity. This is no longer a new virus. At the start of the pandemic, China built two hospitals in two weeks. Canada, on the other hand, stands back and goes “oh no, the hospital capacity!” every time there is a spike in cases. Ontario, a province of concern when it comes to hospitalizations, had previously cut funding to hospitals and reduced the amount of beds. In BC, the previous Liberal government cut funding to hundreds of hospital beds and other health services. This is a pandemic that is fueled by austerity and not by gathering in the classroom, plain and simple.
Who benefits from online school?
Sure, some people really like not having to put pants on and walk out the door to go to school. But fundamentally, students at all levels are paying the price for our government’s and education systems’ incompetence. Make no mistake, however: there are significant beneficiaries of moving life online.
Michael pointed out to me that low-income students are suffering from online learning. Conversely, it is the wealthiest who are profiting. Zoom, the platform where most online classes are held, has been making and holding onto record profits. Zoom’s CEO is one of the many billionaires who have reaped the benefits of confining students to their homes.
In addition, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have been making record profits as well, with tech giants becoming “unfathomably rich”. These are companies that undeniably profit not just from “temporary” measures that place us indoors, but a societal shift that we are, in my opinion, all too permissive towards. Not only are there now digital trails of what’s becoming the bulk of human interaction, but an increasing monopolization of political power. This concentration of wealth means that you have billionaires like Bill Gates with no background in education or connections to everyday people in the education system having immense power over how the school system operates. This is only going to be intensified while we live through the greatest upward wealth transfer in history.
I will quote Dr. Hassan Ali, because I think he puts it better than I do in his recent piece on the Metaverse; another convenient avenue of profit for billionaire Mark Zuckerberg that the pandemic has created:
It’s clear that the ruling class doesn’t really care about dealing with the pandemic. Instead, they are restructuring how they want people to consume. For them, the perfect society is a mass of people glued to screens, ordering takeout, maintaining survival through Amazon deliveries, and building a virtual life in the palms of the ruling class.
The convenience some experience from not having to leave their house is not worth this. And taking steps to make in-person education happen with relative confidence and safety is absolutely a necessary part in resisting it.
Let’s get back to the real classroom, for our mental health’s sake but also for the sake of resisting the bleak society big tech wants to create for us.