Education from afar – Distance education and its consequences for learning by Elias Lilja (2020)

The world, as you know, is going through a global pandemic. Its effects are not just limited to decreased personal freedom, in many countries, closing of bars and restaurants and the obvious lack of festive events. It has had widespread effects on the economy and more importantly on education all around the world. 

But how has it affected education? It has had many different effects, that also differ between countries and their respective school systems. It can also be said to have different effects for different students. Depending on your background the closing of schools will have different effects on the amount you will be able to learn from home. 

In recent research, it has been shown that students from a lower socioeconomic background have been affected more severely as an effect of closing of schools. Primarily, researchers argue that it is an effect of a lack of material necessitates that is required for a good learning environment in your home, such as internet, a good computer and a big house that can allow you to study in quiet. 

But it also has to do with how the schools manage the pandemic and schoolwork from a distance. Some schools, in the UK for example, has chosen to not hold any lessons and are just giving students materials, like textbooks, to work from home. With no support from teachers or councillors. This has a big consequence on learning, especially when taken into consideration that it is primarily schools with low resources and in socioeconomically weak neighbourhoods that does this. 

In my recent thesis I manged to show that students from a stronger socioeconomic home have access to more help and guidance from parents and siblings. While students from low-socioeconomic homes have less opportunities in general to get help with studying. 

When put together with the fact that the pandemic primarily hurts workers in a low-income job, and that it primarily hurts students from low-socioeconomic households paints a miserable picture. And what makes it even worse is that in most western countries, the effects on socioeconomic background in schooling is increasing even before the pandemic. The differences between students from low- and high socioeconomic households will increase even more. What we might come to see is an even more unequal society where what you learn and therefore what possibilities you have for your future is more limited thanks to the effects of closing of schools. 

How we counteract learning loss in the aftermath of the pandemic is in some sense going to decide the fates and possibilities of a whole generation of learners. Closing the schools has a moderate effect on the spread of the corona-virus but has an long reaching negative effect on learning and especially affected is the students that need help the most. Policy-makers need to think an extra time about how closing of schools really affect the public and if it’s really worth closing schools for a small boost in popularity for upcoming elections, while it can have a crippling effect on students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. 

                                                                                                                                                       Elias Lilja

References

Montacute, Rebecca 2020, Social Mobility and COVID-19: Implications of the COVID-19 Crisis for Educational Inequality, London, http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID-19-and-Social-Mobility-1.pdf

Kuhfeld, Megan, Soland, James, Tarasawa, Beth, Johnson, Angela, Ruzek, Erik, Liu, Jing 2020, Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement, Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/cdrv-yw05

Ilzetski, Ethan 2020, The economic cost of UK school closures, VOXEUCEPR, https://voxeu.org/article/economic-cost-uk-school-closures.

Burgess, Simon, Sievertsen, Hans Henrik 2020, Schools, skills, and learning: The impact of COVID-19 on education, VOXEUCEPR, https://voxeu.org/article/impact-covid-19-education