The American Tragedy of COVID-19 by Naomi Zack

Author:Naomi Zack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

New Lessons Learned for Now and After COVID-19

Something could be done about the usual knowledge and skills imparted in higher education, which despite the outreach of public intellectuals and the drive of progressive scholars to develop relevant material, tend to remain pretty much as they have always been. Pandemic disruptions have not tarnished the memory, and many long to go back. However, these disruptions, combined with how they have affected our students and what they think about them, could inspire real curricula change in the humanities and liberal arts, particularly philosophy. The political views of college students who organize, protest, and demonstrate have coalesced peer-to-peer from in-person contact and social media transmission.

Insofar as college students were a large part of the twenty-six million George Floyd/Black Lives Matter 2020 protests, these views developed autonomously and in some degree of isolation and even alienation from professors and administrators, especially since colleges were closed down by the time these protests began. For instance, while the exact number of college students who participated in these protests appears not to have been calculated, Forbes relates these protests to the 1960s civil rights demonstrations and lists a number of factors sparking young adult (i.e., ages eighteen through twenty-four) activism at the present time: the Black Lives Matter movement already has broad support; reactions against racist symbols in building names and monuments on campuses; the unpopularity of President Trump among this group; 93 percent of college students recently polled said that charging the same tuition for online as in-person education is unjust; the use of social media magnifies calls to protest.[26] Forbes is a global media company, covering business, technology, social trends, the economy, and investing—in essence, a gyroscope for the mainstream. So, one could add a sixth factor to the likelihood of ongoing student protest—namely, that it will be expected. And, of course, there is the seventh factor of absence from campus resulting in pent-up energy in need of an outlet. If the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests were largely driven by “furloughed” college students (as the mainstream believes), then the force of student political and cultural opinion has finally come into its own

in the United States. This is one of the most important effects of

COVID-19.

The college students of today are the local and national leaders and teachers of tomorrow. Their own future roles as leaders and teachers develop haphazardly, without foundation, structure, or intellectual resources from institutions of higher education. The issue here is not whether more surveillance or control would be desirable. Rather, the inchoate politics of college youth could bring everyone closer to a resource-rich, egalitarian, and benevolent society if traditional curricula were less removed from their nurturance.

John Dewey provided a beginning for how to think about such educational innovation, in philosophical projects that legitimately attend to education as an integral part of the process of doing philosophy. Dewey was aware of the importance of new ideas, problem solving, and cultural plurality as integral parts of democratic education or educated democracy. He may

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