“Every crisis is an opportunity”. So goes an old saying.
But to transform a crisis into an opportunity it is not enough to know the saying. Intellectual flexibility is also required, imagination to glimpse how to take advantage of it and, above all, the will to listen to those involved.
The pandemic has been, without a doubt, one of the deepest and most extensive crises that education systems around the world have been subjected to. By June 2020 at the latest, we knew that this would not be a temporary situation, but that it would last much longer than the initial optimism had assumed. For the same reason, we were also clear that we had to stop and rethink the future of our work.
The educational actors were reacting quite wisely, within the possibilities they had: they provided their students with the means to access remote classes, trained teachers in various methodologies, created digital repositories of educational material and did many other things. , too long to list.
Many industries also responded quickly and created the technological conditions to move from face-to-face to remote teaching. Telecommunications operators densified their networks, providers of teaching work platforms improved their systems and expanded their offer, and the publishing industry began to develop concepts to increase the content available in digital format, among others.
While all this was moving in a still unpredictable direction, the Ministry of Education made the return to classes the only reason for its management.
This was not in itself wrong or bad, it just wasn’t enough to imagine a better future for Chilean education. Demanding to do the same thing in completely different conditions speaks of the inability to understand the moment that was being lived or of a productivist bias, whose priority was that fathers and mothers return to work.
In any case, the Ministry of Education squandered the historic opportunity to lead a general education modernization process, which would address various dimensions: generate teaching platforms suitable for current training purposes, which would later complement face-to-face work; carry out national training programs in virtual tools and online teaching; create repositories of educational resources and virtual spaces for the interaction of students, teachers and parents; redefine the administrative work that surrounds the teaching task, establishing it, when appropriate, permanently as remote; and even transform the infrastructure of the establishments, adapting them to new labor realities. Anyway, the list could be very long.
But little or none of that was thought and, much less, was done. The depth of the crisis was not understood, nor was it known how to turn it into an opportunity.
Of course, no one can ask another to jump over his own shadow. One does what he knows, because it is what is known. If you have no idea of the connectivity problems, the lack of equipment, the overcrowding in the rooms, the lack of adequate materials, or the teachers who even cross by boat to their workplaces, you can hardly imagine a better world. Even less when you and your loved ones already inhabit a better world.
Thus, the possibility of having led a process of transforming education, which would have placed it at the forefront in matters not only of technology, but also of teaching methodologies and even management, was lost.
As a consequence, the only legacy that remains is the image of an authority that did not understand the historical moment, did not want to dialogue with the educational communities and only insisted on demanding employers to return to the classroom.
- The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The counter.