If School Is Online Next Year, It Shouldn’t Be Mandatory
Instead, give every high school student in America a ‘gap year.’
The last nine weeks have been a fascinating experiment in online learning, necessity allowing its proponents to have a wider testing ground than they could ever have dreamed. But I think the result of that experiment is definitely clear: it’s just not ready to be the way every student learns.
I believe that online learning shows great promise in potentially increasing accessibility and equity, but in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s been doing the opposite.
I’m a privileged student; I have a laptop, stable Internet, and a stable family life. Lots of kids don’t.
When schools happened in-person, that certainly was affecting their learning, but now that it’s all in-home, that effect is massively increased.
But … even for the most privileged of us, many of the things that make school a better deal than courses we could do on our own time are simply gone.
There’s little to no collaboration, for one thing, and many of the tools teachers use to make material more engaging are simply not viable. Teachers trained to teach online might be able to do better, but that’s just not most of them.
I can forgive schools for these issues during this year. After all, they were rushing to put together something, anything, that would make things work out. People needed to finish the academic year, one way or another, and so, they did.
But, in all likelihood, this year will not be the end.
Hopefully it will. I truly hope we can find some way to return to our familiar classrooms and hallways next year.
But I doubt that very much.
Every scientist I’ve seen talking about this, everybody who has a clue about all this, is saying the same stuff: it’s not over, and it’s not going to be over this fall, and potentially not for years.
I do not believe that it is worthwhile to force kids to continue as usual during this time.
Instead, school should be optional.
Every online high school class (and maybe other grades, too) in the 2020–2021 school year should be opt-in only, across the nation.
Colleges should not consider any of these classes during the admissions process.
Then, the next year, everyone can return to their classrooms, and everything can proceed as per usual.
Here are a few reasons why I think this would be vastly better than online learning.
Students can discover themselves
It’s not safe for students to sit in an enclosed room for 7 hours a day, mixing and mingling with others the entire time.
But it might be completely safe for a student to go on a 2-month road trip, or find an appropriately distanced jogging group, or any number of things.
More and more, students have been taking gap years before college, going off to figure out what they really want from life, besides just doing what their teachers tell them to.
This is the perfect opportunity for that self-discovery. Normally, this would never even be considered as an option, because losing an academic year would be unthinkable. But here’s the thing:
This won’t be an academic year.
I am a high schooler myself, and I can tell you that nobody I know got a quarter’s worth of work done during this time.
I’ve spent maybe a third of the time working than I would have in school, and I’m not alone. At my school, teachers are concerned about the inequities I mentioned earlier, and so are assigning levels of work appropriate for people who are struggling.
Fine for a quarter — but we’ll be kidding ourselves if we act like a year of that is going to result in an academic year being completed.
And the alternative, proceeding as usual without a thought for the people who are struggling just to get by in this time, is unacceptable, morally and academically. If that’s what happens, I suspect that the correlation between income and grades, already strong, will only become stronger, which is the opposite of what we, as a country and as people, ought to stand for.
There’s practically no value in trying to do academics right now, because you’ll either be learning very little, or leaving people in the dust. But there is one important lesson that students can learn.
Students need to learn to do things without authority figures pushing them.
All too often, high school students will just follow the beaten track, complete the assignments because they have to, and the only real choice they’re going to make is their elective for the year—but even within their chosen elective, they’re just doing assignment after assignment…
One could make it through high school while barely making a single meaningful choice related to school, besides where to apply for college.
That will not serve our students well after high school.
In college or outside of it, students need to chart their own course, not solely in academia, but in life, and that is a skill that they are woefully underprepared for, thanks to the lack of practice for it in schools.
This Covid-induced, nationwide gap year might be just the solution, allowing them to shake off their apathy and figure out something to do.
And that ‘something’ might include classes at school! Though far too many people are just doing classes because they have to, many students do have genuine interest in one subject or another, and I would hope that those students would choose to take classes in it, even with the limitations of online learning, during the not-school year.
If their interests fell outside the realm of school, they might take a class at a community college, or volunteer somewhere or other, or whatever—it’s not what’s being done that matters, it’s that they’re choosing what it is.
This isn’t going to happen, of course. It’s beyond radical, and the system doesn’t want to relinquish control over the students. The College Board would be livid, and colleges would complain.
But in a better world than the one we have, maybe it could happen. It’s a perfect opportunity to rid ourselves of the inequity caused by online learning while also allowing students the chance to do something they desperately need.
So next year, when we’re all struggling through online learning together, dealing with the inequity and ineffectiveness of it all, just remember: it didn’t have to be this way.
