COVID-19 as a catalyst for educational change
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COVID‑19 as a catalyst for educational change Yong Zhao1,2
© UNESCO IBE 2020
Abstract The massive damages of COVID-19 may be incalculable. But in the spirit of never wasting a good crisis, COVID-19 represents an opportunity to rethink education. The rethinking should not be about improving schooling, but should focus on the what, how, and where of learning. This article highlights some of the questions that schools can ask as they reimagine post-COVID education. Keywords Education change · Crisis · Learning · COVID-19 The epidemic outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has disrupted virtually all aspects of human life, including the tragic loss of many lives around the globe. It has broken rhythms and routines, shattered patterns and norms, and exposed the best and worst of humanity and human institutions. Yet, even these great challenges and great difficulties offer opportunities to question time-honored norms and routines, so we may reimagine and recreate human institutions. Among these institutions, schools are built to serve the purpose of education. COVID19 has certainly disrupted the operations of millions of schools, often forcing their closure. While these closures have prompted innovation and institutional self-examination, the chance of large-scale, long-term changes is largely dependent on how we treat COVID-19 in education. If we treat COVID-19 as a short-term crisis, then whatever we do to help extend learning when schools are closed will be only temporary. As soon as schools are reopened, the status quo will be restored. This seems to be the mindset and behaviors of most schools around the world.
* Yong Zhao [email protected] 1
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Kwong Lee Dow Building, 234 Queensberry Street, Parkville, VIC 3053, Australia
2
School of Education, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA
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Y. Zhao
Another approach is to treat COVID-19 as an opportunity for reimagining education. Schools are institutions for education, but they were built at a time when human understanding of learning and learners, knowledge and skills, as well as teaching and teachers was different from today. Back then, access to experts and expertise was drastically different, not to mention society and the economy. Schooling has been criticized over the past hundred years. The criticism has grown even louder in recent years (Barber, Donnelly, and Rizvi 2012; Wagner 2008; Wagner and Dintersmith 2016). It seems apparent that schools have not been able to deliver what they are supposed to in today’s world, let alone to prepare for tomorrow. However, even the reforms that have been promoted over the years have hardly touched the “grammar of schooling” (Tyack and Cuban 1995; Tyack and Tobin 1994) or the core business of schools. The call for changing schools has never stopped. The efforts to bring changes to schools have never stopped either. But the present opportunity to completely re-imagine education is unprecedented. To avoid repeating the gr
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