88960
  • Log in
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Forum
  • Donate
  • Newsletter
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

Universities Must Not Switch to ‘Remote Learning’ Again

by Toby Young
13 December 2021 12:51 PM
Asia student do not understanding about online learning, stress and unhappy on the bed room this immage can use for home work, education, business and job concept

Asia student do not understanding about online learning, stress and unhappy on the bed room this immage can use for home work, education, business and job concept

We’re publish a guest post today by Dr David McGrogan, a Professor at Northumbria Law School, making an impassioned plea to higher education providers not to switch to ‘remote learning’ next term in response to the Omicron panic. In his view, this will send a series of terrible messages to students, including that the world is a dangerous place and you had best avoid it by living your life online. You can link to Professor McGrogan’s Substack newsletter here.

It’s “déjà vu all over again” as Covid restrictions are reimposed. The sense that more is coming is almost palpable – a repeating pattern that it increasingly feels we will never escape.

Here in higher education, the mood is a strange mixture of resigned and febrile. On the one hand, staff and students plod gamely on towards the end of the semester while trying not to think about the news. On the other, there is a drumbeat of anxiety underpinning everything: will we be here in January, or will it be back to the dreaded ‘remote learning’, which we performed for almost the entirety of last year?

‘Dreaded’ is not too strong a term. The experiment of 2020-21, if it can be called that, was a disaster. It is no slur against either academic staff or students to confess this. We all did our best, but it was made painfully evident during the last academic year that human beings simply can’t learn from sitting in front of a screen. Teaching is a relationship that has to be performed in person, where teacher and student can read each other’s gestures and facial cues, gauge each other’s reactions, and – more importantly – build the foundations of trust on which education rest. Students need to be enthused about what they are studying by being in a room with a lecturer who really appreciates the importance of their subject. They sometimes also need to be told to concentrate, to listen, to stop looking at their phones. None of this works when mediated through a digital device.

Those are just the educational reasons why the shift to remote learning was so harmful, though. Far more serious, in my view, were the messages that it sent to students.

The first of these messages was: although your money is important, you as an individual are not. You may have had a bad experience, but that doesn’t particularly matter in the grand scheme of things; universities stayed afloat, halls of residence were full, the number of NEETS did not explode and embarrass the Government, and the game went on. You were worth sacrificing in the name of those imperatives.

It was hardly deliberate that this message was sent to undergraduates, but it is the one which many of them, consciously or unconsciously, will have taken from the way they were treated during 2020-21. It is unfortunate enough that this will have created a lot of bad blood between students and universities (despite the fact that it cannot really be said to be the fault of universities themselves). More seriously, it will have created a lot of resentment in the younger generation toward society as a whole: when push came to shove, they now will feel they were really just an afterthought.

The second message was: the reason why you go to university is to get a degree. Why does it matter if you didn’t really learn much all year and had a rubbish experience? You’ll get a 2:1 at the end anyway. Higher education was already being instrumentalised at speed thanks to the introduction of the requirement for students to pay tuition fees. The shift to remote learning put this on rocket boosters.

However, it will hardly need emphasising to anybody who went to university before, say, 2010, that the experience is about much, much more than just getting a degree. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott memorably described university as an “interval” – a “reprieve for three years from the rat race”; a kind of pause between childhood and the “long littleness of life”. It was sheer “good fortune” to be able to go, and it was there to be enjoyed “as Pope Pius II on his election said he intended to enjoy the Papacy”. It was “magic”, and if missed once would never come back again.

It is fashionable nowadays to look snootily down one’s nose at university students and their supposedly pampered, frivolous lives. There is something deeply mean-spirited in that outlook. Shouldn’t we want our young people to have the sheer pleasure and freedom that Oakeshott described, especially if we were lucky enough to have been students once ourselves? Shouldn’t we consider it one of the most wonderful blessings of living in a developed economy to be able to spend three or four years of young adulthood simply in the exercise of exploring, and doesn’t it diminish the younger generation to demand that they leap into the “littleness of life” without even a brief pause for breath beforehand?

The third message sent – perhaps the worst of all – is that the thing to do in this world, when adversity strikes, is to hide. We already face what can fairly be called an epidemic of anxiety and other mental health disorders among the young. That problem will not go away if we continually transmit to teenagers and young adults the message that the world is dangerous and, since it is, you had best avoid it by living your life online. The truth, as we all know in our hearts of hearts, is that, yes, the world is dangerous, but that’s no reason not to live as full and rich a life as one can. We do our young a terrible disservice when we encourage in them a fear of normality. Yet this is precisely what we will be doing if we insist, once again, that it is simply too risky for a normal university education to take place.

It was perhaps excusable that nobody paused to consider all of this in the pell-mell sprint towards remote learning in the autumn of last year. It will be well remembered that there was simply a general sense of panic; universities were by no means alone in being swept along in the flood. This time around, there can be no excuse: enough is enough – we have to get university life back to normal.

Tags: Omicronremote learningUniversities

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

Scientists Demand Primary School Children be Vaccinated as a Condition of Remaining Open

Next Post

The Scottish Government Will Inevitably Introduce More Covid Restrictions, Says Humza Yousaf

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

44 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

DONATE

PODCAST

Nick Dixon and Toby Young Talk About Toby’s Appearance on the 77th Brigade’s Watch List, the Scrubbing of the Internet After the Pfizer Sting and the Trans Insanity Unfolding in Scotland

by Will Jones
31 January 2023
0

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editors Picks

MIT Expert on Drug Safety Calls for Immediate Withdrawal of mRNA Vaccines: “Clearly the Most Failing Medical Product in History, Causing Unprecedented Harm”

30 January 2023
by Will Jones

News Round-Up

31 January 2023
by Will Jones

Scientists Struggle to Understand Why Antarctica Hasn’t Warmed for Over 70 Years Despite Rise in CO2

29 January 2023
by Chris Morrison

The Ministry of Truth

31 January 2023
by Dr Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson

The JCVI is Right to Withdraw Boosters for Under-50s, But It’s Still Spinning the Stats

31 January 2023
by Amanuensis

News Round-Up

48

Elderly Vaccination Saved Lives in East Asia

39

The JCVI is Right to Withdraw Boosters for Under-50s, But It’s Still Spinning the Stats

34
Mandatory Credit: Photo by JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (10421665ds)
Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg addresses world leaders at the start of the 2019 Climate Action Summit which is being held in advance of the General Debate of the General Assembly of the United Nations at United Nations Headquarters in New York, New York, USA, 23 September 2019. World Leaders have been invited to speak at the event, which was organized by the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, for the purpose of proposing plans for addressing global climate change. The General Debate of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly begins on 24 September.
United Nations 2019 Climate Action Summit, New York, USA - 23 Sep 2019

Elite Billionaire Foundations Fund Wave of Green Climate Propaganda Flooding into British Schools

18

The Ministry of Truth

14

Elderly Vaccination Saved Lives in East Asia

31 January 2023
by Noah Carl
Mandatory Credit: Photo by JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (10421665ds)
Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg addresses world leaders at the start of the 2019 Climate Action Summit which is being held in advance of the General Debate of the General Assembly of the United Nations at United Nations Headquarters in New York, New York, USA, 23 September 2019. World Leaders have been invited to speak at the event, which was organized by the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, for the purpose of proposing plans for addressing global climate change. The General Debate of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly begins on 24 September.
United Nations 2019 Climate Action Summit, New York, USA - 23 Sep 2019

Elite Billionaire Foundations Fund Wave of Green Climate Propaganda Flooding into British Schools

31 January 2023
by Chris Morrison

The JCVI is Right to Withdraw Boosters for Under-50s, But It’s Still Spinning the Stats

31 January 2023
by Amanuensis

MIT Expert on Drug Safety Calls for Immediate Withdrawal of mRNA Vaccines: “Clearly the Most Failing Medical Product in History, Causing Unprecedented Harm”

30 January 2023
by Will Jones

In Praise of Boris Johnson’s Stance on Ukraine

28 January 2023
by Noah Carl

POSTS BY DATE

December 2021
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Nov   Jan »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Forum
  • Donate
  • Newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Create New Account!

Please note: To be able to comment on our articles you'll need to be a registered donor

Already have an account?
Please click here to login Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment