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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

I think one thing that will make the history books is how little innovation or adaptation there was in educational technology, rendering a truly depressing set of prospects for learning over the pandemic. A lot of companies have made a LOT of money in edutech going back to the 90s CDROM days and what do students get when the system escapes these companies's grasp and students need some real imagination put to the matter? A grid of Facetimes and draconian activity surveillance.

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The entire concept of our "education" system is bankrupt. The very idea of keeping an entire age of children in lockstep across multiple subjects regardless of ability stifles actually solving any issues. Why would you expect the very people who perpetuate this injustice to even conceive of a solution let alone implement it?

Why is this being downvoted?

Are our kids not beautiful snowflakes on the spectrum of intelligence or is it just gender?

The staff of a Bible belt school are just as guilty of this as the SF admins removing advanced maths. None understand that computers allow us to promote people upon mastery of a subject (what we actually want) rather than time.

What were they supposed to do? They had about two weeks to go from fully in-classroom to fully-remote with no warning, in the middle of the school year. I don't care what kind of technology you have, that is going to be a clusterfuck.

The problem was this clusterfuck lasted for far too long and public guidance was and still is a complete mess.

We panicked everyone instead of having a level-headed policy where we stratified risk by age and health condition.

Should we also stratify by Relation to risk, and how do we enforce this ? Also how would policies stratified by age/health work? Only unhealthy or old people need to mask when they go to the store filled with unmasked, Covid-spreading young people?

Masking is fine! Prolonged shutdowns aren't. Anyone who wants to go to work should have been allowed to, others are welcome to isolate.

Special times could have been reserved to allow the elderly/unhealthy/fearful to go shop and take care of themselves. (Costco senior hours?) There are a lot of options.

When has there been a prolonged shutdown? I am in one of the heights of the Covid epidemic and we only shut down once in early 2020. Schools are still in person now at the height of omicron. What’re you talking about?

Los Angeles, one of the largest school districts in the USA, where there was no in-person school for over a year.

How does remote school == prolonged shut down? Los Angeles was having outdoor dining and stuff during that time. It’s clear that schools simply were t prioritized at that time, not that the city as a whole was on lockdown.

A whole year? Did one of the parent had to become stay at home parent or how can it even work for working class?

Quebec, Ontario, Australia, France, Italy, Ireland, South Africa...

Australia wasn’t under a prolonged shutdown. They were fully unmasked and having parties over the summer. Movie companies were filming there specifically because of how Covid-free they were. Again, what are you talking about?

That would be fantastic. I'm triple vaxxed and have had covid twice. I frankly don't care anymore.

> no warning

We're in the third year of a global pandemic and nothing that is happening now is something that wasn't predicted as a serious possibility.

Pretending everything is fine doesn't make it fine. Acknowledging the situation we're in, and having plan for "rapidly spreading variant that starts impacting kids more" is something that would be an obvious thing for schools to do.

We concretely knew in November this was coming. Again, many people tried to pretend this wasn't happening and brush it off, but there was plenty of time to foresee this situation and plan for it.

The vast majority of people, on all sides of the political spectrum, have aggressively been trying not to see what is happening in front of their eyes. To try to force things to be "normal". If we accepted that we're in a pandemic, and that sometimes we'll have to change our life a bit, we could have easily prepared for this case.

>They had about two weeks to go from fully in-classroom to fully-remote

Yeah, and then they had 2 years to rethink it

This is exactly my point.

But it is now two years in. I wouldn't have expected something in 2 weeks, but in 2 months? Thought that something would have been built.

Yeah maybe by fall 2020 you could have expected better preparation. On the other hand, I think people kept thinking it would go away over the summer, or we'd just reach herd immunity. I think very few people in summer 2020 thought we'd still be mired in this in 2022 with no end in sight. None of the previous virus scares, SARS, flus, Ebola, Zika, came anywhere close to lasting that long.

What were they suppposed to do? Of course they had to limp along for a bit, but it's been almost two years now and as far as I've heard (I don't have children), it's status quo where they aren't trying to force kids back into the classroom. Try to remember the first time you heard the term "distance learning." I think it's been at least 10 years for me.

Having started an edtech startup & had many friends do the same

I promise you, it is not the companies who are failing to deliver innovative in education

They cannot survive the way schools decide how to buy software - I.e. district level admins are the only ones with decision making power.

So, I can see that being a problem for kick starting the business, but what about private schools?

It seems like there are tons of them with tons of money managed at the single-school level of scale. Do they just have better software than the public schools? Are they not enough to support edtech companies growing to the size where they can compete for the government contracts? Something else?

What, are there innovations that are gathering dust because of the decision style of a bureaucracy? I find that hard to believe, that new ideas wouldn't have leaked out to the startups in this space (Coursera, etc.). Obviously even the Ubers of Learning aren't doing anythnig different than 5 years ago or we would be seeing Super Bowl ads from them, because the effect and implications would be seismic. Imagine if suddenly classes were able to be as effective as anybody has been wanting, which is to say "noticeably more effective." What if it wasn't a grid of facetimes anymore? I think that would probably be a big deal.

I would like to point out a subtle distinction:

There was a lot of strong pivots in education. It's just that all (most?) of them were bad ideas.

My point is, you can still innovate and adapt while finding 1000 wrong ways to do something

Are those bad ideas documented anywhere?

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