As Albert Einstein so astutely pointed out: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school,” but even Einstein did not foresee the predicament in which universities and colleges find themselves today.
B.C. universities and colleges have announced that, because of an abundance of caution about the health of everybody involved, for now at least, students will be receiving their programs online at home.
Post-secondary life will change now because the pandemic has forced universities and other post-secondary institutions to make forays into online “lessons at home” — something they never anticipated having to do.
As a result, a version of course work will be retained but something just as important to will be lost.
That something missing from university life will be the “Hidden Curriculum” — the educational experience beyond what is normally learned but is often not part of the formal course of study.
I recently had dinner with a friend from undergraduate days 60 years ago at Sydney University in New South Wales.
We talked of the day we sat on the grass in front of the Humanities building and watched Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello play Take Five up on a hastily rigged stage under a warm blue Sydney spring sky.
We talked about the friends we’d had back then and still have; the party animal who later became a NASA astrophysicist on the International Space Station and the prickly English tutor who later became an international author and leader of the feminist movement.
We talked about the Pete Seeger concert in the Union Theatre — a never-to-be-forgotten lesson in what music is all about.
We talked about having dinner recently with a high-school and undergraduate-years surfing buddy who had shocked us all by “shacking up” with one of the girls in our group — unheard of in the early ’60s in our post-adolescent social circle.
We talked about the undergraduate politics we’d embraced and the many others we’d avoided — all part of growing up in a quasi-intellectual environment.
We talked about the legendary and heavily oversubscribed bi-annual lecture on “The Freudian Interpretation of Nursery Rhymes” by one of our off-the-wall Psych2 profs. Not to be missed by engineers, medical students, no-psych students — everybody.
We did not talk about why John Donne was regarded as one of the Metaphysical poets or whether Shakespeare’s Macbeth was considered as being at the literary crossroads between Greek and Elizabethan tragedies.
Nor did we talk about Kierkegaard and existentialism, although we did recall how Martin Buber, one of the gods of existentialism, welcomed us all at door of the Wallace Lecture Theatre like the village pastor.
What Buber actually said in his lecture was lost in the mists of 60 years, but the lesson in humility inherent in his welcoming gesture was a lesson we never forgot.
No, what we talked about mostly was what had really mattered to us at the time and what stayed with us for the rest of our lives — the “Hidden Curriculum,” the core of undergraduate life.
As first generation university students from lower middle-income non-academic families, we learnt how to interact with peers from completely different socioeconomic or even academic backgrounds and not feel “left out.”
We talked about how the “Hidden Curriculum” of university life taught us to accept different races, groups, or classes of people and what ideas and behaviours were considered acceptable or unacceptable in this new culture, one very different from our own backgrounds.
We talked about incrementally feeling less self-conscious and unschooled in the company of classmates who’d had the benefit of a much more worldly experience.
We reminisced about how we had come, in that first undergraduate year, to realize how circumscribed our lives had been, confined as they were to country towns that were essentially villages in the shadow of the great metropolis — Sydney, New South Wales.
A romanticized trip down nostalgia lane? No, not really. Online education is a new reality, but not as, Einstein infers, a replacement for the Hidden Curriculum, which is all a part of an on-campus education.
As Daisy Christodoulou suggests in her new book Teachers vs. Tech, there is a discernible “gap between what we know about human cognition and what often gets recommended in education technology.”
But with access to a patchwork of resources, teachers at every level, typically, will adapt to the new reality of teaching and learning and, being teachers, they will do what they can on behalf of their students.
But the “education” Einstein spoke about will have to be set aside for the moment.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
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