LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Teaching K-12 kids at a distance didn’t arise with Covid-19. It dates back almost 100 years.

Why are we not getting this right?

In 1937, when a polio outbreak closed Chicago schools, teachers turned to technology: radio. Classes were broadcast by teachers on at least six stations; lesson plans and assignments were published in newspapers.

When schools went remote as the pandemic took hold last spring, I started calling experts and educators to see if any educational institutions had a history of doing distance learning well. Retro Report’s mission is mining history for lessons about the present, so you could say this kind of research was my job.

The truth is, I was desperate.

My daughters, five and seven years old, normally adore school but it got to the point that my 5-year-old one day concluded — in a tone of beyond-her years, existential bafflement — “Daddy, I think I hate my iPad.”

But in a few corners of the education world, there were few schools that didn’t miss a beat, because they’ve been teaching kids at a distance for more than a century. I wrote up what we found in this piece for Medium’s politics and culture publication, Gen. It’s a story about history, pedagogy, technology — and some killer trivia in there if you happen to be a fan of Britney Spears.

Distance Learning Has Been Around for 100 Years. Why Can’t We Get It Right?