Education in a Pandemic: We’re Teaching, But We’re Not
Normal. not normal. We’re teaching, but we’re not. Suddenly we find ourselves all thrust apart. Institutions that seemed concrete become virtual at the flick of a switch.
Everything that it really matters to learn is always an accident. The unseen and unexpected have turned us out of our seats of learning. We stare in wonderment, briefly, at how soluble the routines of everyday existence are. We encounter a global ‘teachable moment’, one which will be quickly forgotten. No lesson is ever truly remembered. That which we learn we hate the most. Better remember what we have not learnt. Our ignorance is our comfort. No more planes, trains and automobiles, movement itself is become a luxury. We already inhabit the tomorrow of the post-global world, a return to the comforts of community, the imprisonment of home, the brutal limits of how most people live, even in the age of automobility. Bound to place. Bound to identity. Free.
Most forms of education today are irrelevant. The university is a dying institution long overdue a systematic rethink. Something it shares with most structures in the Global North. A bastion of privilege that no longer confers privilege. A machine for the construction of future indebted generations. Generations burdened with the unasked-for responsibility to repair a broken world. Markets for students from the Four Corners are suddenly unmasked as foundations built on sand. Forever institutions shudder. Ill-deserved surprise at the impermanence of grow, grow, grow. Learning can never be a market. Or, better, it can be, but not forever.
Suddenly we are all online. Lectures. Seminars. Meetings. All the irrelevant verbiage of managerial manners is set aside. What no REF? How will we compete when we cannot reproduce the fantasy that knowledge is equivalent to a position in a league table? Positions we all knew to be fictions, are laid aside in an instant and it is all hands to the pumps, maintaining the final week of teaching of a strike deducted term. In a crisis property returns to the owners.
What would our new pedagogy look like if this present were to remain with us?
My feeds are full of opportunities to learn. Magical masterclasses. Youtube restorations. Yoga! The piano. Invitations to language classes. When we are so busy learning at home who has time to go to class anyway? Why were we there in the first place? It is not just that there is now time to do it all at home, but that we are now positively under the obligation. The desperation of inactivity. The tyranny of mediatized sociality. Life hasn’t changed.
And what when we come together again in class to discuss all this? When everything is normal, and the new world is a forgotten memory? What is it that will limp on? The old learning is dead, a new one struggles to be born. Open access is suddenly really available to all, but it will be reappropriated in due time by publishers whose rates of profit rival or exceed those of banks. What purpose those unique moments of insight in the lecture hall once all is recapable? The circulation of academic hard-form texts is in long-term catastrophic decline; new journals multiply beyond all need to serve the bundles that soak university library budgets. For the moment the confining, blank, un-postered, un-graffitoed surfaces of the bland walls of institutions cleansed of ideas are dissolved, but every effort will be made to put them back.
All true learning is about touching the new. It is the moment of encounter with the unexpected possibility. It is a gift that unlocks the suzerainty of the present and the past over our future. For a moment we have lived in that future, the good and the bad. It is a lesson we are all learning together as a collective, both the good and the bad. But like all good lessons we will soon lock it away, in an effort of forgetting. The pain of the new is very real.
What would our new pedagogy look like if this present future were to remain with us? It should make us fearful. A world without universities? Or academic publishers. Or academics? A world without the student? A world in which every act of learning is produced by a Google, or a Youtube, or an Amazon? The perfected corporate capture of the mind?
Some things must remain. Or We must struggle to keep them. Learning as a collective, community practice still matters. Being together, inhabiting the same space and time, still matters.
The return to an unaltered classroom will comfort us all, the usual flows of capital and people sustaining our well-ordered sense of ourselves and our place in the world. Is there nothing more to take from this moment than this? Perhaps the most valuable lesson, that all things are mutable, all things are mortal. Even institutional ideals and practices embedded in mediaeval histories might find an ending. But, if so, then some things must remain. Or we must struggle to keep them. Or we must relearn them. An idea of learning as a collective, community practice still matters. Being together, inhabiting the same space and time, still matters. Foolishness and joy still matter. They teach us more than all our reading lists and exam rubrics and intended learning outcomes ever will.
We are learning in this moment, but what matters in what is learned is always how and what it changes, for good or for ill. I am relieved to meet my dissertation students online. Their work, with all its usual strife, keeps me in touch with the purity of knowledge for its own sake. Their projects matter to no-one but us. They are battling the dark moments of self-doubt that all true creativity entails, and the overcoming of which is learning itself.
The wisest, kindest people I have ever known never went to university. They failed, in our terms, but they taught me everything. To love. To be kind. To seek wisdom over knowledge. Encountering some of this in our collective grief and fear, perhaps we can learn to turn our own institutions of learning and pedagogies away from the false gods back towards some encounter with what it is to be wise. An encounter. Always an encounter. In a place, and at a time. Together.