I despise the notion that "real communism has never been tried!", but real online teaching has, uhh, never been tried.
The futuristic dream: kids use fancy tech like AR goggles and haptic tech to manipulate shapes in a collaborative learning game and ultimately learn math in an intuitive way. Think of the best Jypiter notebook you've seen and then take that off the screen and into the real world. Then add an AI assistant that constantly guides you through common questions and make it so that the whole program is continually being refined to make it better and better for each successive generation of kids. Every lesson has tens of millions of dollars poured into it since it will be reused potentially billions of times.
The practical dream: okay we don't have money for any of that, but at least use the internet to break geographic constraints. Have actual math teachers teaching math to various classes around the country/world, have actual music teachers teaching music, immediately direct gifted kids to accelerated classes, have more flexibility with special needs kids (e.g. take classes in a different time zone so that their parents can help), offer a wide selection of second languages by connecting kids to foreign teachers, do virtual exchanges, etc.
The reality: most kids don't even have computers. Actually I was shocked to learn that many kids don't even have chairs and desks at home. This is in Canada by the way. My wife was teaching K-8 online classes to kids lying on their beds, propping up their mom's borrowed iphone on their bellies, trying to not fall asleep as the front camera streams a dimly-lit view of their chin.
So to summarize, we start with the same in-person learning, from the same teachers to the same class, remove all of the blackboards/manipulatives/etc., reduce the child's field of view to a 6" screen streaming a laggy 480p video with horrible sound, delete all friendships by enforcing quarantine both during and after school, and finally conclude that online learning doesn't work!
We do exactly this at the startup [1] that I'm running. Depending on their level and the equipment they have, young children learn Chinese online with native teachers using Zoom on their phones or StoryLand (eg Gather) on their laptops.
Many commenters have mentioned that socialisation and its associated obligations are beneficial to learning, and this is what we are reminded of everyday among our students.
Kids learn best when they see other kids learn. And kids learn best when they are able to directly apply what they learn into a project that they own. We enable our own students to publish their own books and to perform in musicals that they produce.
Many online education companies fail because they think that all online education ("edTech") is simply digitising the school. It's not. To succeed, we need to think deeply about what online and physical education does best.
It doesn't even need to be that complicated. Starting out with good software that tracks exercise progress of the students, giving them exercises on a suitable level and immediate feedback would already go a long way.
And teachers could use it to see, how the students perform and know what to teach in more detail.
The futuristic dream: kids use fancy tech like AR goggles and haptic tech to manipulate shapes in a collaborative learning game and ultimately learn math in an intuitive way. Think of the best Jypiter notebook you've seen and then take that off the screen and into the real world. Then add an AI assistant that constantly guides you through common questions and make it so that the whole program is continually being refined to make it better and better for each successive generation of kids. Every lesson has tens of millions of dollars poured into it since it will be reused potentially billions of times.
The practical dream: okay we don't have money for any of that, but at least use the internet to break geographic constraints. Have actual math teachers teaching math to various classes around the country/world, have actual music teachers teaching music, immediately direct gifted kids to accelerated classes, have more flexibility with special needs kids (e.g. take classes in a different time zone so that their parents can help), offer a wide selection of second languages by connecting kids to foreign teachers, do virtual exchanges, etc.
The reality: most kids don't even have computers. Actually I was shocked to learn that many kids don't even have chairs and desks at home. This is in Canada by the way. My wife was teaching K-8 online classes to kids lying on their beds, propping up their mom's borrowed iphone on their bellies, trying to not fall asleep as the front camera streams a dimly-lit view of their chin.
So to summarize, we start with the same in-person learning, from the same teachers to the same class, remove all of the blackboards/manipulatives/etc., reduce the child's field of view to a 6" screen streaming a laggy 480p video with horrible sound, delete all friendships by enforcing quarantine both during and after school, and finally conclude that online learning doesn't work!