This Economist article tackles the issue of school closings as a result of the coronavirus, or COVID-19. Nearly 1 billion students in the world have had schooling interrupted to some extent by the virus spreading across the globe. At the time of publish, over 100 countries have closed or partially closed their schools.
It remains to be seen if these measures will slow the spread of the virus. Countries like China and Italy have already lost thousands of lives from the pandemic, and many other countries are still at least a week behind those in the growth of their infection rate. Either way, the virus forcing governments to close down schools is maybe the better of two bad options (that and keeping them open for education purposes but risking the viral infection).
A scary statistic from a 2009 study to consider is that if schools are closed for a month, between 6% and 19% of key healthcare workers will have to stay at home to take care of their children. There are other externalities to consider from closing schools other than the obvious effect of moving to online courses.
The courses themselves are not necessarily the problem; online education has tons of potential, especially as a way to educate those in poorer areas with a lack of quality schooling (or any schooling at all). However, the middle of a pandemic is one of the worst places for the ramping up of such programming to occur. We will see if K-12 and higher education are able to handle this very tall task.
https://www.economist.com/international/2020/03/19/how-covid-19-is-interrupting-childrens-education
5 comments:
I think transitioning to e-learning is definitely going to be challenging, but it is the best measure taken with recent circumstances. Globally, schools, business and industries have shifting to either be remote, or shut down entirely. There is definitely hope that these measures help curb the pandemic and contain the virus as much as possible. The externalities of moving schools online are present, but the risk of the virus spreading is much larger than them.
It will defiantly be interesting to see what happens and how this situation in tackled, but we should lay our faith with projections cause we have no idea what this is going to end up looking like. The chances are that students will suffer academically because most of them will not take it seriously.
The new developments in education will definitely be put to the test in these upcoming months on whether or not they will succeed in teaching. But as far as if this will benefit the economy now, it will surely help the stop the spread of the virus but is also slowing down people getting out and consuming even more. Also, hopeful there will be people that step up and help those in the health industry that have kids because they are needed badly at work.
While I agree with your final comments about online education being helpful to students in order to maintain their schoolwork, I do not believe it will directly be helpful in lower income areas. In these school districts, students may lack the reliable technology to access online schoolwork, and the school districts lack the local funding to provide such technology. This issue has come up in Michigan public schools, and the state is considering making any online schoolwork not valid for those who go that route, as it is not equally provided across school districts in the state.
It is interesting how the whole country is adapting to this kind of change. I do believe we are heading towards more online based learning and this is just an early step towards it. I also agree that lower income families would struggle to adopt this change but for now this is the best we can do
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