Apart from learning: how Coronavirus is undermining a generation’s future

Over the last months, thousands and thousands of children and teenagers have spent their days in loneliness, being for hours in front of a screen – the same screen that, only one year ago, their parents had tried to make them less addicted to. But an invisible enemy has changed everyone’s life since then – and is now threatening not only the present, but also the future for the younger generations, who see their psychological health at stake without the human interaction they need to grow as individuals and members of society in their most vulnerable years. And it is not only a psychological growth issue – competences and knowledge are also seriously affected by distance learning. This poses obvious ethical questions: where should societies draw the line between (mainly older) people’s health and the prospects for younger generations, the future of societies themselves?

It’s 8:00. The alarm goes off for Francesca, 14, a first-year student of one of the best renowned high schools in Milan, Italy. She runs to the kitchen to have some breakfast – just a quick coffee and a couple of biscuits: her mother, a teacher, is just about to start her own online lesson, and the kitchen will be off-limits for the next hours. “She always has her camera and microphone on, obviously, and she does not want us to be in the background and distract her students”, Francesca says. Better to grab some extra snacks for her break while she still can.

She brushes her hair, wears a jumper on her pyjama bottoms and sets up her computer in the living room. There are five members in her family, and only her dad works outside of the house now. Francesca’s two older sisters, with whom she shares a room, are both university students. One has a part-time job as a sales and logistics assistant that often requires her to be on the phone, and she usually stays in their bedroom. The other uses a desk in the corridor that leads to the bathroom. “She does not need to have her camera or mic on for her medicine lectures, so she does not mind not having a quiet room to be in”. Francesca, on the other hand, is required to be on camera at all times. Not that it prevents her from looking at her phone, which she constantly keeps on the dining table she uses as desk, or splitting the computer screen and getting distracted from her lessons in other ways. It’s 8:10: Francesca is ready to start her school day.

In another neighbourhood, Anna is also getting ready for her lesson. As a high school teacher, she knows the problem of her students’ distraction very well. “I have to always keep an eye on their images and spot them when they freeze their videos. Or some say that they have connection issues and their camera does not work. Obviously, I can’t say anything in that case, and you have to rely on your students’ maturity to understand that they are the only ones to lose if they do not pay attention to their lessons. This is easier with older students, but much harder with 13-year-old boys, or with the most fragile ones”. Her school’s headmaster, however, decided that if connectivity problems keep happening to the same student, teachers should report it and the student will have to physically go to school and have lessons there, alone with the teachers, who would be required to go in too, and the rest of the class following from home, in the so called “dual-mode”. The school has this measure in place to ensure that all students have access to a functional internet connection, and several laptops have been handed out for free to students from lower income families who did not have a computer for their exclusive use. This luxury, however, is not available in all schools, and according to the Italian Institute for Statistics 12.3% of children between 6 and 17 do not have a computer or tablet at home and 57% have to share it with other members of the family.

Anna gets ready for her lesson. Both of her daughters have left home to study in other cities, so space is not a problem for her and her husband, who is also working from home, or, as the Italian prime minister calls it, “smartworking”. The greatest challenge for her is to keep the students’ attention high, and to stimulate interaction and participation. “You have to make an active effort, be more empathetic, make some jokes, try to keep the atmosphere a bit lighter, if you want to reduce the distance that being physically apart inevitably establishes”. Anna tries to make her Italian literature, history and geography lessons more entertaining with videos and other materials she shares with the class, but most of all she tries to stimulate debate and discussions. “It has been working relatively well, also because students know that part of their grades come from their active participation in lessons. And in this sense the platform we use works well; they raise their hands and I am able to organize everyone’s intervention so that everyone gets to speak. But obviously it can’t be like a normal debate – that kind of interaction is impossible to replicate online”.

The live interaction with her school mates is what Francesca most misses. She has been able to meet them only in the first weeks of school. But as Covid cases rose in the region, all high schools went online-only again in October. “As this is my first year, I did not know any of my classmates. And I am not particularly extrovert, so I find it hard to actively contact people I have hardly spoken to in real life. Luckily, teachers have been assigning us a lot of group projects, forcing us to get to know each other, but it is quite a limited interaction anyway”.

Anna believes that the lack of face-to-face interaction will have serious consequences for the personal and cognitive development of students, especially younger ones like Francesca. “But all of them, the older classes too, will surely have deficits in knowledge and skills too – expressive and interpersonal skills in particular. And online, teachers can not cover the same program they would do in school. You have to cut authors, texts you analyse, and especially in classes that were not with me last year I’ve had to do major cuts in the history program too, by giving them only schematic summaries for entire chapters of history. And yes, students who are already very motivated or come from certain types of families, where parents think school is important and have the time and means to look after their child’s education, will be able to fill in these gaps by themselves. But the same can’t be said about kids who are weaker in the subject, less motivated, or come from a less supportive background. That’s the real failure of school in this situation”.