Education after COVID

On many evenings in January, I hustled my two children to bed, cooing, “You need a good night’s sleep: you’re going back to school tomorrow!” only to eat my words the next morning. First, schools were supposed to open on schedule after the winter break, on January 3. Then, with Omicron surging, the date was pushed back by two days, until January 5. Then, after a flood of health concerns were raised, the reopening was postponed to January 17. On January 17, there was a massive snowstorm, and they claimed that COVID precautions would be too hard to observe. And again on January 18. They had given up on remote schooling by that point. The kids were feral. Ontario, where I live, has closed schools for longer than almost anywhere in North America or Europe during COVID (Ontario, 2022). The Ontario Science Table, which nominally advises the provincial government on COVID-related policy, has opposed further closures, noting: “Ontario evidence shows that school closures are associated with substantial mental health and educational attainment harms” (ibid.). For a worn-out working parent like me, they are also associated with a very low irritability threshold and a growing backlog of unanswered emails. The publication of this issue coincides neatly with the two-year anniversary of that week in March when COVID-19 first shut down my part of the Western world. It is difficult to appreciate the scale of chaos and the amount of heartbreak that was endured by so many while others, myself included, sat in comfortable homes, day after day, living through Wi-Fi connections. But one thing that hit home, quite accutely, for just about every parent in the world was the educational crisis precipitated by the pandemic. A global reckoning of the educational damage done by COVID-19 is already underway. The data are dismal, if unsurprising. A report released by the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF in December 2021 predicted a loss in lifetime earnings of $17 trillion for the COVID generation (UNESCO, 2021). Whatever we may think about this narrowly economic interpretation of educational outcomes, it captures concerns that most of us who work in education are likely to prioritize: the report documents how the pandemic amplified inequality within and across nations. COVID hit our systems where they were weakest, burdening the least well off in a tragic upending of Rawls’ maximin principle. If there is a silver lining, it is that no one can now deny that a functioning education system is central to the functioning of the rest of society. As the international ethics consortium Globethics has highlighted, the reinvigoration of education worldwide should be regarded as a pressing ethical priority in all our post-pandemic thinking: “as the world reacts to the heavy loss, of life, of livelihoods, of health, of industry, of education and starts to emerge from one of the most disruptive periods in modern times, asserting values-driven and values-oriented education is critical for a sustainable future” (Globethics, 2022). Policy makers and practitioners seem open to philosophical guidance as they start to reconstruct education in a post-pandemic world. The editors of PIE felt that this moment was ripe for reflection using the problems, tools, and wisdom of our field as an entry point. How can philosophy of education help us understand the impact of COVID? And how has COVID impacted longstanding questions in philosophy of education? To approach these questions, I invited leading philosophers of education, mostly North American, to write brief, free-form essays on their thinking about their areas of expertise in light of the pandemic. The concept was inspired by a special supplement in Harper’s magazine …