The Coronavirus Pandemic

with technology, or just having lots of fun. Students can be deeply engaged with ideas they’ve never heard of and that are presented to them in ways that make no use of technology at all. Students can eagerly engage with all kinds of material, including esoteric topics and darker aspects of life that can hardly be called “fun.” Take a closer look at engagement, and its nature and appearance can be surprising, unexpected, counterintuitive, and anything but selfevident. It’s not enough to tick a few boxes for engagement on a checklist, or move descriptors of engagement from level to level on a rubric. If we want to do something useful and powerful with engagement, we can’t gloss over it or whiz past it. We need to get fully engaged with what engagement actually is ourselves.

The key point is that engagement and disengagement are not just inner psychological states. They are results of what our schools are like and what they do to children’s inherent interests in and curiosity about learning. Given that babies and toddlers are naturally engaged with just about everything, we have to think hard about what our schools do to children and teenagers that actively creates disengagement.66 We will see that disengagement is not the product of thoughtless and uncaring teachers who trudge through tedious material in dull monotones from the front of the class. Rather, it’s a consequence of how we design learning and teaching in a diverse and rapidly changing world.

These were big enough challenges in the early months of 2020. Then along came the most disruptive change in schools for at least a century: the global COVID-19 crisis. This unprecedented pandemic led us to question practically everything we knew about teaching, learning, and student engagement.

The Coronavirus Pandemic

Once the pandemic hit, all across the world, children stopped going to school—90 percent of all children, 1.6 billion of them, in 195 countries.67 Nothing like it had happened since the long-forgotten H1N1 influenza virus had raced across the globe more than a century

before. Because of the coronavirus, millions of families were sequestered in their homes and had to follow shelter-in-place rules. In Italy and Spain, Canada and the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea, schools were shut down and playgrounds were taped off. Streets everywhere were emptied of laughter and joy.

Suddenly, educators were running real-life experiments with some of the most extreme educational innovations that had ever been devised. For decades, politicians, business leaders, and media pundits had criticized schools and their teachers.68 They complained that lessons were boring and that teachers were trapped in a rigid, old industrial model of education.69 Some claimed that students could be liberated with project-based inquiry, “personalized” learning, and greater uses of digital technology.70 Right-wing think tanks sometimes wanted to dispense with teachers and with schools as we knew them altogether, and replace them with online learning.71

Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch condemned the technophiles as harmful “disrupters” who were motivated by greed.72 The criticisms of traditional education weren’t entirely original, however. Ever since the 1970s, influential gurus like the AustrianCroatian philosopher Ivan Illich had called for people to commit to deschooling society. Brazilian activist Paulo Freire wanted to put an end to the banking model of education that deposited knowledge in people’s brains as if they were vaults. 73 At both ends of the political spectrum, there seemed to be plenty of agreement that traditional schools were more of a curse than a blessing. The simple remedy seemed to be to abolish them once and for all.

In 2020, all of a sudden, the novel coronavirus did temporarily abolish schools. Homeschooling—which had previously catered to just 3.5 percent of Americans and 1.5 percent of Canadians—became the near-universal state of learning for practically everyone. In the most expensive private schools and some of the best-funded suburban schools, teachers received support to flip their classrooms online, and students were able to keep up with their lessons. For many highly motivated students who were already able to learn independently,