Computers are great for reinforcing the rote part of learning. They are currently terrible for getting students motivated or over mental blocks. Those issues can be addressed by well designed programs, but US teachers were largely unprepared for this abrupt change in format.
I have a PhD and a research job, so I think it's fair to say that I can learn independently and like doing so. And yet, my Coursera account is full of half-completed classes that weren't quite what I wanted: too easy, too hard, topic isn't what I wanted, presentation isn't my style, etc.
It looks, in short, just like my Netflix queue and that isn't surprising because they're both things I do in my pajamas. The situation would be very different if there were actual consequences for finishing these MOOCs (or Lost).
Additionally, I still don't see VC offering the same level of social interaction and ideas transfer that in person does - one big gap I've seen is the difficulty "forking" larger conversations into smaller ones (it just doesn't come naturally like it does in person). I would not have wanted my education to be remote for that very reason.
I suspect kids of wealthy, educated parents will actually excel. Those parents will learn that they could can actually do better than schools on the pure academics.
Unfortunately, I suspect kids of poorer parents will really slow down.
But, yes, I think we're about to unbundle a lot of education.
[edit] though yeah, future years’ testing may tell us something. However, since it’s happening to all grades, and given how often other factors change that make results incommensurate, it’ll be tough to pull anything useful out of the numbers.
The crisis takes away the classrooms and exposes the tools to parents. And for some people the classroom made little difference, or held them back.
By fall, I think you'll have people asking whether school boards shouldn't just offer the tools. Let people pick and choose their own arrangement of teaching, video, testing and groupwork. (This would let wealthier parents recover some of the amount spent on unproductive childcare, and put it into learning and socialization.)
And for those of us with really young kids, this work from home may be great an all, but its really hard to work and tend to a very young one's education/attention.
And you're comparing public schools to prison? Remote learning for all of them would fix this?
And I don't know why you're clutching your pearls about the prison comparison. It's a common topic of discussion, how the public schools are similar to prisons, employ similar methodologies, how the stakeholders have similar motivations, and even how the two systems are symbiotic with one another.
I'm not saying remote work will necessarily solve everyone's problems, but that if you're concerned about your child's socialization you should be concerned about what's happening to him in the public schools.
A combination of online activities and irl could work.