OP-ED: The experience of bricks and mortar

If online academia is the present and future, where is the need for reverting to the education of old?
Eighteen months ago, we were confronted with the reality of King Covid, the magnitude of which compelled a revolutionary realignment of the mechanics of life and survival. Institutions similarly underwent a sea change. And nowhere is this more manifest, is this transformation apparently more complete, than in the universe of pedagogy.

In a few short weeks of the first quarter of 2020, we made the reluctant transition from classrooms bursting with children to a billion individual units of learning, each separated by physical space and connected to a “school” dissipated in the ether of the internet and connected to its pupils by the “Zoom call,” the generic expression for a tool of communication long since subsumed to the versatility of Microsoft Teams.