This bad course marked by the pandemic is ending. We have days for the students to finish the classes, the teachers to close the evaluations, write the reports, and look to the future.
Maybe quieter than normal, but the alarm clock woke me up at the usual time. Today, too, the wet day has started and I have already ruled out the possibility of going to work in the public service. On the way from the private car to school, I've come to the exit of the freeway, and I've seen the phenomenon again that has become commonplace: four or five cars wait in the payline with the automatic machine and a single car in the worker's "manual" queue in the cabin. As usual, I have entered for the latter, which besides being faster, allows me to share good days and thank you with a person. On the way to the car park, I think about how exactly the same thing happens in the supermarket, since the automatic queues were placed in it to pay.
Leaving the private car in the public car park, I walk the last part of the school and I wonder if it would not be for my part a selfish rather assiduous entering the worker's row. Is it more comfortable for me, but for the worker? Counting the money, passing the ticket and opening the barrier, over and over again, with cars coming drops to the right and left, doing as many hours as automata, is it nice? Is it feasible for the worker? I remembered that when I was a kid, I preferred to be a fireman to work like a pawn, because I was astonished at how he sat in the cockpit and picked up the money his father had given him, like the previous car, the back car, sitting and getting rich! Pagotxa's dream is short, and the trace of that money is lost in a public-private whirlwind before the barrier opens, leaving a small wage for the worker. The worker needs money because only the life-sustaining resources that can be obtained for money. What salary would you get if your automattic work was done by a robot? Who would pay? And that robot, is it going to pay for the worker?
I finally came to my work with these ideas. An hour after leaving home, I sat down, opened the computer and connected to the video call room to serve the confined students. Although the course for students is over, the two workers we are the COVID-19 booster are fulfilling our hours as automata. The truth is that when the centre with a hundred teachers has received three teachers as a reinforcement, I think they have been successful in managing these resources, because throughout the course the students have been – in waves, more or less – confined at home for about ten days. The pandemic has brought to the surface an issue that has previously been more hidden, how to guarantee the right to education in a situation of non-presence? How can we guarantee equity in these conditions? Despite being in public school, how do you balance imbalances when some have more resources and others less at home and when you have to work from home?
That has perhaps been the first question that the unexpected and immediate digitalisation of education caused by the pandemic has left last year. There are many questions that I would like to comment on, if the reader has reached this point, because we are less and less able to read in depth. It is said, and it is true, that we are reading more than ever in this time of information chaos caused by the Internet and social networks. But it is also true that we read headlines and short texts, information pills – even overdoses – and that it is already showing that we are losing the ability to read deeply – and with it, to think abstractly. This loss is only one more characteristic of the world of the new channels, languages and codes used by the generations born in the digital age to relate to the environment, a consequence that has been measured for the time being in terms of the cognitive development of young people. According to some, what comes to us now is the size of the change we suffer from oral to written tradition, what is the role of education on those occasions? Should we teach students how to properly write emails or help them use their phones?
Of course, care is not only what should be done, but also what the teachers who are at the top of the list of illegal ratios can do, what we come to. I am convinced that since March 2020, we have all had the most important work of all time, and we will still have much to do to adapt our learning materials to the digital sphere. Private and foreign publishers of traditional textbooks are also working on this effort and sure that many teachers will have no choice but to rely on their work. Meanwhile, platforms such as moodle have been launched in the education system for at least ten years, but there are still a few professors who freely share learning materials. In a public school, shouldn't the material be public? Should non-proprietary platforms not be used? Should the materials produced by the teachers not be public? Do we really have to turn to Google tools because they're "more intuitive"? How long are we going to rely on other people's textbooks?
In short, new technologies have come to us in an old education system, we have new questions to answer the challenges we always face. We can't deny that digitization offers the opportunity to improve the education system, but that doesn't come from heaven. What's more, what falls to us as the rain is the Google Empire, which is soaking the education system down to the bones, with more capacity and speed to get to know each other and improve. Soon the artificial intelligences of the Empire will know better than the teachers how teaching and learning are done, and so what? Why can the teacher make robots? What do centers do with a screen if possible? My time has come, I will automatically turn off the computer, I will go home again and in the meantime I will look to the future; the holidays come.