A new concept
of distancing

The educational and productive urgency of the pandemic period dispelled one of the myths that seemed unshakable until a few months ago. We refer to the possibility of effectively managing professional and school commitments remotely.

While having to consider an obvious period of adjustment of systems and technologies, it is clear that the need to be present in the company to be able to carry out their duties, has been for a lòong time  a sort of screen with which companies have masked other purposes and other truths.

On the one hand, the desire to control the employee in the most canonical nineteenth-twentieth-century employment setting. On the other, the inability (or unwillingness) to create a relationship of trust with collaborators over the long term.

In this way, it was possible to manipulate, for the benefit of the stronger party, the disproportion of contractual power between company and employee. It also made it possible to take advantage of a targeted turnover of personnel and a progressive devaluation of professional salaries.

But beyond this mental approach – overcome by history and which denotes a lack of lucidity and confidence in the ruling and administrative class – and although the need for physical presence for some types of work remains evident, it is possible to immediately identify a plethora of occupations suitable for digital migration. These are works that, although they can be carried out remotely without apparent problems, have been deliberately relegated to a forced physical constraint.

Using partial justifications for the substantial technical gap of some cities (weakness of the connection networks, lack of reliable presence detection systems and so on) or the inadequacy of the rules on the subject, jurassic occupational traditions have been maintained for decades. All at the expense of consumption (unnecessarily increased), the environment and available resources (unnecessarily depleted). For years we have witnessed endless rows of cars directed to the cities, unnecessarily heated and illuminated offices, inefficient, dirty and congested means of transport: anyone who has traveled for work knows this evidence well.

Digitizing the professions, easing the movement for all those workers called to perform jobs related to the use of a terminal or a device, now seems a process no longer postponed. In the same way, the pandemic has shown the fragility of the arguments of the management class, imposing a precedent that – in the contractual or trade union phase – can no longer be ignored.

A different school

But this new remote content management approach didn’t just affect the business sector. The school has also been heavily changed since the current emergency. Once the initial disorientation has been overcome (especially experienced by the teaching staff) and a decent technological infrastructure has been set up – elements that will take some time to solve but that represent the least of the problems – it will be possible to attend school with efficient virtualized presence systems.

A clarification: it is not yet clear whether the “digital solution” is necessarily the most efficient for improving education in a Nation and for managing pupils in such a delicate phase as childhood or adolescence. However, remaining anchored only to past settings, remaining blind and deaf in the face of new teaching possibilities, helps to precipitate education in an abyss that certainly does not seem a desirable arrival point. Let’s try to outline some future scenarios for learning systems.

Now there are countless medical and pedagogical studies that invite you to reflect on the concept of frontal education, prolonged for six / eight hours a day, dropped from above and with a clear dichotomy between chair and desk. And this is why one of the benefits of this historical change could concern precisely the quality of teaching.

The school will be able to put education on the agenda, understood as a process of true learning, and not just the reiterated equation that binds a teacher to a certain number of pupils to manage.

One could easily arrive at the situation in which few truly qualified teachers, capable of involving and captivating, able to make the concepts deeply understood, will face very large audiences. Maybe then supported by a large number of moderators or technicians who will manage the individual learning units or coordinate the exercises.

In this system, different schools will compete to grab the best teachers and a healthy and meritocratic competition will be established between them to carry out their function in the most famous institution. This is already happening for many Universities.

Since there is virtually no limit to the number of students connected to the same lesson, many students will be able to attend high-level lessons, modulate their learning system in an individualized way so as not to force the class group to perform unnaturally. Lessons from all over the world, in all languages, with in-depth lecturing systems and management of individual difficulties.

In this scenario, the real discriminating element will be the quality of the connection, the presence of a system to determine the interactivity of the virtual exchange and the reliability of the student’s control system (presence, punctuality, attention, veracity of the exams taken, etc.) .

In general, therefore, we will see a greater investment in the quality of the teacher and a lesser relevance of the school as an infrastructure and institution. More space for the digitalization of the classrooms (which will look more like film sets than dusty rooms with a blackboard and chalks, as happens today) and all the devices for managing the presence of the student, his effective participation (we could say, pro-active) to class.

All this, of course, with only the goal of the evolution of teaching in mind, starting from the ability of awareness, analysis and reflection of the pupils involved. Moreover, if the transfer of the physical dimension of the school is a necessity, at least this transfer must be made in front of an advantageous and incisive counterpart.

By the way: to those who object that in this way human interaction between students and teachers would be lost, it is easy to answer. First of all, freeing up more time for children means giving them the opportunity to have new life opportunities, even non-virtual ones. Education (parental, public and civic), together with the capacity for collective participation, will then become the true foundation of the quality of these relationships. In addition, the school could also organize meetings de visu, but episodic and cyclical, so as to verify the progress of the study and the results achieved within small groups related to curricula, learning ability and cultural extraction.

The idea of ​​a school regardless of better only because “in person” is a myth that should be carefully evaluated. It is enough to attend a class, of any order and grade, on any day of the week, to observe the limits of this prejudice. Absent students, spread on benches and pervaded by a depressing apathy. Often unprepared teachers who have memorized the same lesson for years, without any communicative inclination. School programs manufactured in series, suffocated by nineteenth-century protocols. Hoping for a sudden return to “this” school sounds perhaps convenient for those who have to manage the problem of children and their placement during working hours. Much less for those who care about the learning and training of a conscious individual.