Recent research indicates that school shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on kids. During the two years that students were sequestered in their homes and trying to learn online, test scores for math and reading went down. Additionally, Pew Research has reported that kids experienced increased mental health issues associated with anxiety, depression, and grief because of the pandemic. As kids have returned to school and society pushes for normalcy, let’s take a few minutes to consider the role of education from a sociological perspective.
It is important to understand that education and schooling are not the same thing. Education is the transmission of knowledge, skills, values, and beliefs from one group to another. On the other hand, schooling is the formal educational process that takes place in institutions such as schools and centers of learning. Learning how to sew from your grandmother is education. Learning how to sew by taking a structured sixteen-week class from a fashion design instructor at a college or university is schooling. Arguably, the issues students experienced while working at home during the pandemic had to do with both education and schooling. Not only were they trying to learn the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic in a manner significantly different from what they were used to, but they were also doing so without the traditional structure and support often associated with the educational system.
In terms of schooling, experts contend that literacy, the ability to use the skills of reading and writing to shape one’s world, was tremendously disrupted by the pandemic. UNICEF has said that the extent of educational setbacks globally is “nearly insurmountable.” Only time will tell how this plays out in the future. Without the same level of literacy as previous generations, one possible scenario is that social reproduction, the process of children remaining in the same social class through intergenerational transmission of various types of capital, and social mobility, an individual’s or group’s movement up or down the system of stratification in a society, could be impacted.
