Why is the Whole World Upside Down? Education After COVID-19 and #RemoteLearning

Lately, I’ve been reading and reflecting a lot about Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Somehow when I feel stressed, I turn to science as my security blanket. I feel comfort in the tested theories and proofs as if all of life’s unsolved mysteries can be explained with science. Surely, during these uncertain times, trying to figure out how we got here and where we go next is on everyone’s mind. Mine too.

Darwin’s theory is one that is easily misunderstood. Most people don’t know the backstory of how his theory came about and whether he actually agreed with his conjectures but we accept his ideas as a fact, by and large, and teach it in our textbooks. But his ideas are why the whole world is upside down.

The problem, whether we are aware of it or not, is that his ideas of “selection of the fittest” have paved the way for our economic principles and so much of the discrimination and atrocities in our human world–from civil wars and genocides, to acceptance of violence as a norm–justifying it as our primal urge to compete for scare resources and force “natural selection”. We’ve accepted his ideas because it was the first attempt of describing the complex behaviors that we observe in nature, but I think this COVID crisis is helping us to examine these ideas and ask ourselves if this is how we want to continue living as a species. Because the truth is, if we really make a study of nature, there’s a helluva lot more evidence for cooperation rather than competitition in the endurance of living things. Darwin actually wrote about this but it often goes unnoted.

But whether you are taking about plants (The Hidden Life of Trees  )  or microscopic , single-celled organisms (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life), there is a complicated web of life that is the operating system that runs in the background of all things, from the most mundane elements of Earth (How to Read Water) to the deepest understanding of intelligence (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness). And the fact that our economies are coming to a grinding halt during this pandemic exposes this fault in our thinking of our origins and purpose in life. Economists may have taken Darwin’s principles too far.

However, to not seize this moment in Education would be a terrible blunder. Especially since we now have the world’s attention of how dang important educators are in our societies. We really can’t go back to “business as usual” when our doors reopen. We need to be looking deeply into ourselves and asking if this world paradigmn that we live in is the world we want to continue into our future.

We’ve been granted a second chance.

Will we take it?

Needless to say, this is bigger than technology. It’s not about the level of preparedness that educators had when walking into remote learning. We could focus on that but I think we should be looking at the glaring equity issues we have–survival of the fittest–if you had access to technology and wifi, you got to continue your education online. If you didn’t, schools either were temporarily canceled or teachers made packets of uninspiring worksheets that put your brain to sleep–and ultimately got burned in a trash heap since districts were too afraid to have teachers actually grade them for the fear of spreading the virus. All that “school work” went up in flames. Ironic and metaphorical at the same time.

There’s this part of Darwin’s theory of Evolution that we should focus on. Adaptation: a change in a behavior or physical feature that improves a living thing’s ability to survive.  If we superimpose this concept onto culture, we call it innovation.

Innovation is often considered to be a value. But I don’t think so. It’s a necessity in my mind, a conscious decision. Natural selection is only one form of evolution but change can be also be a choice. That is where innovation comes in.

In the course, New Learning: Principles and Patterns of Pedagogy , Dr. William Cope reminds us that “there is one important thing which does distinguish human beings from other sentient creatures on the planet. And that is the fact that we can change our species via learning….what’s unusual about human beings is  we change our species being all the time and we do it through culture. 

I share these thoughts of Dr. Cope to demonstrate how important this time is to reflect and consider WHAT’S NEXT in our human paradigm and our role to consciously decide as educators how we can support this transition to new ways of thinking and living in our world. I believe that as we move through this pandemic, we will also have a crisis of the heart and mind as we grapple with how we might use this opportunity to innovate in Education and embrace new ways of doing “school”. We can use the power of formal education to steer humanity in a new direction.

An Einstein Approach

Just as we are awakening to the ridiculousness of “standardizing” our students with testing, let’s not make the shallow mistake to make this about apps and tech. It’s much more primal and significant than that.

Albert Einstein once said:

So, if our thinking has gotten us into our mess, then we have to revise it.  Education plays a crucial role in this.

The truth is that living things are exposed to disease all the time. That’s not new.

But we deem this a crisis because it has changed our way of living. And that may not be a bad thing in the long game if we get to eradicate the wrongful premise that the only way to survive is at the expense of others.

Because what the scientific evidence is now demonstrating is that it’s our relationships that helps us to solve-problems (code word: adaptation). And doing this TOGETHER will be the only way through this situation. We can not simply survive but we can thrive if we stop doing the same things and thinking in the same ways that got us here.

And, if we don’t want to be “same-same, but different” (same content but with a splash more of technology in there for good measure), then we need to look critically at our curricular content and school structures, while asking if it is truly serving a higher purpose for living beings, big and small. We have the power to choose this.

So, it is in the spirit of Nature’s truth that begs us to rethink schools and rebuild our world.

So what if we got Darwin all wrong?

Here is some of my first thinking what should be the basis of new standards in Education.

1. Empathy should become a part of our content because it helps us to understand the relationship we have to our world.  We don’t read and write to pass a test, we do it to connect with the world.
2. As a skill, explicit teaching of cooperation and collaboration should become the new “norm” in our school.
3. Grades are an artifact of “selection of the fittest” thinking in which we rank and value our students based upon their academic knowledge. It’s an artificial and inhumane way to evaluate students. We need to stop this practice.
4. No more, dog eat dog: content should include a new paradigmn in which we highlight peace and inter-relationships. How to solve conflict is an essential skill.
5. Moreover, social emotional learning isn’t fluff. It’s a vital for developing human competence.
6. Sharing is not just caring, it is an essential component to life. All life. So, the circular economy and sharing economy shouldn’t be a fringe idea, it should be a guiding principle.
7. Awareness and appreciation of intelligence is not just a human thing. It’s in ALL things and when we recognize it, we can transform our life experience.

So, I want to restate what I said earlier:

We really can’t go back to “business as usual” when our doors reopen. We need to be looking deeply into ourselves and asking if this world paradigmn that we live in is the world we want to continue into our future.

We’ve been granted a second chance.

Will we take it?

Let’s set the world rightside up. We have the power to do that in Education.