Among all the “big” changes ongoing, our sense of space/place/ location is one of the most profound. It is one thing to talk about “virtual space”, and quite another to re-arrange much of the structure of civilization to accommodate the new reality.
We might look to a similar re-arrangement undertaken when the “personal automobile” created new relationships to place and location, and space as well. It has been noted that the car even created a new class of persons, “the teenager”, who often lived part of the day inside a mobile space free from adult supervision, which supported new cultures derived from that circumstance. (Which affected teen attitudes toward education as well)
IOW, we’ve been through this before. While the changes to accommodate the automobile unwound over decades and decades, our current changes to accommodate virtual space, are compressed by pandemic into years instead.
The odd coincidence of the pandemic arriving just when the potentials of ubiquitous video communications were becoming realized, has brought to the fore a requirement that all finally have affordable access to broadband. And when everyone is connected to virtual space in robust ways, that means each part of our civilization must accommodate the new reality.
Three big obvious areas of change are the use of virtual space to replace/ supplement physical space in “office work”, education, and healthcare. At a minimum, such change means noticing and re-examing the “givens” of the previous uses and structures of physical location, in the light of what will be different when we fully use virtual space.
Today, we are getting an in-depth look at the functions of physical space in education, and many are now realizing that the location of what we call “the school”, is a place where many functions take place only tangentially connected to learning.
As noted in previous years here at the PSA website, schools perform a very important function of being a place/ location where children can go while their parents are away from the home working. It can be debated how safe schools may be for children, but generally, there is adult supervision ongoing, and the children are contained in a known space.
The “school” is currently also a locus for healthcare, meals, supervised sports and recreation, and more.
But what if parents stayed at home often, doing WFH? For many children, the home would then be a “better location” to spend many of their days, as long as education continued apace. (however, for children in poverty, the home might not be a better location to meet children’s needs )
It’s possibly a simple question of:” What’s the best use of physical space when we have virtual space as an alternative?”