Should We Start Closing Schools

Last year, schools were shut for months. Teaching was put online, though not very effectively. There has been a steady increase in mass on line learning at higher levels for several years now, and the experience at Universities in the last year, must have given a further impetus to it. Ten years ago, people had started doing their shopping on line, but the lockdowns of last year gave a massive boost to what was already an established trend that has basically killed off the High Street, and even out of town shopping at bricks and mortar stores. A few years ago, I asked the question “Why Do We Need Libraries?”, setting out that not only do we have libraries in schools, colleges and universities that could be used by the public, but that the internet meant that it was possible to establish an online national library, in which every book, every reference work, could be instantly available in unlimited quantities. Today, having closed schools for months, and with teachers and others demanding that they be closed again, the question arises, should we now start closing schools? The savings could be substantial. 

For one thing, as the experience of mass on line learning for higher education shows, huge numbers of people can be taught simultaneously by just a few teachers/lecturers. All of the restrictions of class size, imposed by the physical environment of a school are done away with. We could probably reduce the number of teachers required for such mass on line learning to a quarter of the number of teachers employed currently. The time taken by teachers to get to schools miles form where they live, and the similar wasted time of students, in travelling, would be removed, leaving that unproductive time available for additional teaching and learning. With only a quarter of the teachers currently required, the teachers actually employed could be of higher quality, better trained, and even with higher wages, whilst still representing a huge saving on the cost of education provision. 

The saving on the costs of building and running schools would also be huge, with that money now released for the purpose of actual teaching and learning. The experience of other areas of online shopping and so on, is also instructive. In many spheres now, from banking to the provision of utilities, users, when they go online, and have queries, are offered chats and many of those chats are now with bots, using artificial intelligence. The development of AI, and of machine learning is happening at an increasing pace. Students will require to also have queries on their work and study answered, and all of that can be done by using such chat bots, which will also learn at an increasing pace, as a result of such mass interaction with students. A large part of the work of teachers could be replaced by the use of such bots, meaning that, within a short space, the number of actual teachers required could be reduced to perhaps just 10% of those currently employed. 

The kind of teachers required would also be changed. It requires teachers who can translate their message into the kind of media presentation that online learning requires. In fact, it may be that a very small number of actual teachers would be required to produce the teaching, whilst a larger number of media production workers took on the job of translating that teaching material into audio-visual material, and interactive systems. Indeed, with the more rapid development of VR even practical activities, such as lab experiments, could be undertaken in virtual space. 

In Singapore, the fact that it has had 1 Gigabit broadband, for all of the country, for some time, has meant that it was able to provide education for its children in the home for years now. That, of course, is a problem in Britain, because of the appallingly backward condition of its broadband infrastructure, and the low level of aspiration for increasing it shown by the government. Singapore, for example, is already moving to 2 Gigabit broadband. Just watching some of the online discussion with contributors on news programmes shows how slow and unreliable the broadband connections in Britain are. Effective online learning will require a substantial improvement in that infrastructure. 

Another issue, is in relation to younger children. They could not be simply left in the home, on their own, to learn. But, of course, large numbers of workers are themselves now working from home, so that this issue is addressed in those cases. What in the 20th century was a movement from what had been domestic labour to socialised labour, as children went from being looked after by parents and grandparents, to being looked after by professional nursery and primary school teachers, would be reversed. The issue of the socialisation of children is also one that would require attention, but this would simply take other forms. A large part of such socialisation always occurs with children in your neighbourhood rather than with children at your school, which may be two completely different things. Saving on time travelling miles to school, would, in fact, give more time for such socialising with others in your immediate locality. 

Not all parents are able to work from home, of course, but then it still becomes possible to have other neighbourhood collective facilities in which young children can be supervised whilst they undertake online learning, and those facilities do not have to be supervised by expensive teaching staff. The current campaign to close schools, as with the closing down of other social activity in response to COVID, could see the same kind of acceleration in moving teaching out of physical buildings and on to the Internet, which would also bring about a massive reduction in the number of teachers required. Lock downs have accelerated the move from bricks and mortar to online in whole areas of life, and it has brought significant increases in productivity and reductions in costs with it. The number of people having online consultations with doctors, for example, has increased substantially.  That the same thing should now occur with schools as they are closed down once more is only natural. 

Of course, many of those advocating that schools be closed down, now, are not doing so with this transformation in mind. Yet, it is the inevitable consequence of the closures they are currently advocating. If schools can be closed for months, then why not for good? Especially, if the advantages of online learning are then realised, not just in terms of the quality of the teaching that becomes available, the saving in time for students, but also the huge reductions in cost that such a change brings with it. 

As for the actual current demands for closing schools, they are clearly absurd. School students, other than those suffering other medical conditions, are at essentially no risk whatever from COVID. Nor are the vast majority of teachers and other school staff, because COVID19 is a virus that almost exclusively attacks the elderly, and, in particular, those over 80, very few of whom are working in schools. There is a significantly increased risk for those over 60, but again, there are few in that category employed in schools either. For those that are, or who have other medical conditions putting them at risk, then the obvious solution is to put them on indefinite sick leave on full pay, and now that vaccines are becoming available, to put them in the priority category for vaccination.