The Coming Education Disaster - An Idiocratic Collapse Risk
Human beings are not instinctively good at assessing and mitigating risk. We tend to overweight short-term risks and underweight long-term risks, and to overweight personal risks and underweight societal risks.
As the world emerges from Covid’s pandemic phase—and hopefully skirts a second pandemic by getting monkeypox under control—other risks are arising. Skyrocketing debt levels. Supply chain bottlenecks and inflation. Understandably high rates of anxiety, depression, and resentment about inequality. All of these are massive problems deserving of massive, coordinated responses that hit the right leverage points.
But in the U.S., the biggest risk arising from the pandemic is the coming education disaster in the aftermath of remote learning. It’s not just about lost knowledge. It’s about lost social and emotional development for kids—and lost opportunities in a broader sense as experienced teachers retire or flee the profession, leaving students to fend for themselves in a failing educational system.
But unlike inflation’s right-here, right-now, in-your-face risk, which increases pressure to deal with it ASAP, the coming education disaster is a slow time bomb that will go off in a decade or more when affected students graduate. That delay means it’s hard for our human minds to correctly weigh and mitigate the risk—and accept the cost of mitigation—in the present.
Contrary to appearances, this is a serious and immediate problem. There are now two education systems in the United States: a system for the rich (defined as people in private schools or high-income public school districts) and a system for everyone else. For the past two years, students in the rich system tended to have more in-person learning opportunities, whether through parent-organized tutoring pods or official private-school policy. Students in the everyone-else system more likely received remote instruction when COVID waves spiked. (It’s worth noting: although this essay focuses on the US, other countries had it even harder—and remote learning, while problematic, was better than nothing.)
Okay, so the problem in the US was that remote learning didn’t work well. And remote learning is mostly over.
Well, the initial crisis that led to remote learning is mostly over. But the echoes are reverberating. And reverberations and oscillations don’t always settle down like ripples on a pond. Sometimes they amplify like seismograph tracings during an earthquake.
At the outset of the pandemic, rigging together remote learning amid a worldwide emergency was necessary. But it didn’t work well for a lot of students and families. And some kids never even logged on to remote learning. They just … didn’t go to school.
In non-emergency circumstances, it might have worked better. Some students can do well with remote learning, depending on their learning style, age group, home environment, parental support, teachers’ skills in remote instruction, and high-speed Internet and computer access.
But there was a crisis. It disrupted everything. And now, in order to tamp down oscillations instead of making them worse, we need to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were. That’s precisely what’s not happening as students return to classrooms. And that’s the bigger problem.
Meeting people where they are?
Yep. Many students have fallen behind not just in coursework, but also in social development. One or two years of relative isolation might be hard on adults, but imagine going through that during your formative years, when you’re supposed to be learning how to work and play well with others. On top of that, many kids have lost loved ones or have a parent with long Covid. There’s a lot of trauma sloshing around in society at large.
Many teachers see the problem with marching forward with in-class instruction as if 2020 and 2021 didn’t happen, but support from school administrators can vary widely across districts. Teachers’ responses, so far, are understandable: many are retiring or leaving the profession.
It seems likely that, simply to get enough teachers in classrooms, standards for teaching credentials will be lowered in the future, and the quality of education delivered will suffer. Meanwhile, the steps necessary to stem the outflow and keep highly skilled teachers—paying them (much) more and giving them a greater voice in how they conduct classroom instruction—aren’t happening fast enough.
It’s noteworthy that staffing shortages disproportionately affect the everyone-else system. Higher-paying school districts can provide better working conditions, which may help them retain or recruit better teachers. But lower-paying districts with tougher working conditions are more likely to struggle. And parents in lower-ranked school districts may not have the resources, time, or energy to provide the education the system is failing to provide.
The long-term risk
The long-term risk is catastrophic societal decline. This is not an exaggeration, though it may sound like one. The kids affected by this disaster may never catch up, because there is no coordinated national-level program to ensure they do catch up.
If they are left to struggle for the remainder of their educational career, they will be poorly educated, justifiably angry, and ill-equipped to fix the other massive problems looming in the 21st century. The end result will be further decline of the US relative to other countries that understand the importance of a functional and well-supported education system. This is actually a national security issue.
Takeaway: without a massive, concerted, coordinated effort now to help students catch up with the essential learning and socializing they missed during the pandemic, catastrophic decline of the US seems inevitable.
Because it’s a long-term risk, and humans are terrible at those, the most likely outcome is that we will not do enough to address it, and then bemoan our collective fate when our neglect bears fruit down the road. The outcome will reinforce a two-tiered society, with a small, rich cohort and a huge, undereducated, angry cohort. This is a recipe for disaster. The end result is likely collapse. And right now we are doing nothing to stop it. Our grandparents would be staggeringly disappointed in us.
Even more important, the next generation will be staggeringly disappointed in us. Our actions right now are entirely unfair to them, and educational collapse is avoidable at this point, given sufficient funding and motivation. It’s not too late.
What could be done?
A catch-up program, coordinated and funded and designed to prevent the worst impacts in the future. Implementing such a program would mean abandoning some nice-to-haves. Not every book would be read. Not every concept would be taught. Only the essential ones. Social development would be prioritized over checking every box on the curriculum. There would be a foundation provided, so motivated kids could go farther on their own if they choose, and most kids could function as productive members of society even if they don’t pursue further knowledge.
The next generation deserves our effort. Not nothing. Not a collective shrug. The future is our responsibility, whether we like it or not. And long-term risks deserve just as much attention and timely action as short-term ones.
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Extra, Extra!
Three links from the depths of my bookmark archives; think of these as tangential extras for curious readers:
1. DeepMind unveils how it solved a 50-year-old challenge that could speed drug discovery - by Jeremy Kahn in Fortune - a great, succinct summary of a breakthrough on a complex problem.
2. Children born during pandemic have lower IQs, US study finds - by Natalie Grover in The Guardian - social isolation is disrupting cognitive development even among the youngest.
3. Mini Lectures in Probability - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - quick, information-dense hits on an often-misunderstood topic.