What does education look like in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic?

At the K-12 level, you’ve got problems. At the collegiate level, you’ve got existential problems.

School is out for the year in most locales. More innovative districts are retooling like crazy and trying to do online classes. Parents are looking for cheap or free resources to do the job and keep their kids occupied during our enforced isolation.

In short, we are all homeschoolers now. Expect that to be much more the case next school year, as enough parents who were forced to try it either a) like it and decide to keep this knowledge train rolling or b) don’t believe the schools are safe enough to send their kids back into and so suck it up.

This will create knock-on problems for public schools certainly, and also for private schools. Wonder Art Workshop: C... Haughey, Sally Best Price: $12.47 Buy New $14.50 (as of 03:10 EDT - Details)

Kids go to school for six-plus hours a day, but a lot of that time is wasted. In most cases, you could run through the lessons in about two hours. Parents are seeing that now.

The pandemic quarantine is showing us that schooling is basically state- or parent-sponsored babysitting with some ABCs, 123s, dodgeball, and the prom thrown in.

This highly credentialed child care costs taxpayers a lot of money. So long as things kept trucking along, most of us were not of the mood to too closely scrutinize these expenses. But now that we’re out the money and have to take care of the kids, reassessment is going to happen.

Public education will survive, of course, but in a reduced capacity. Fewer kids will go and school bonds will become a harder sell. Expensive private schools will also face scrutiny, as the now-poorer parents have seen that they can do this on their own if they so choose.

The sector of education that is in real trouble is higher education. Costs have gone nothing but up as schools have used the money from student loans to do things like build more buildings, hire an assistant to the assistant to the assistant of the president — basically anything but put that money back into the classrooms.

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