Remote

I see a whole cringe that comes from the world of school, pathetic complaints of characters who want to erase distance learning from the school world.

Most of these are senior professors who have obtained unofficial hierarchical positions in schools, only because they are familiar with the tortuous astruseries of the ministerial bureaucracy. And they know that if everything moves online, much of their power will be transferred to colleagues who are more agile if immersed in digital media.

But what is not said is what they really fear when it comes to distance learning. And it's simple.

They are afraid of private schools.

Let's try to see what changes, for private schools, if the public becomes familiar with distance learning. Imagine drawing a private and digital school, and let's compare it with the current situation.

So, today as today if you want to make a decent private school, you will have to buy or rent a building. You will have to bring it to have the housing and safety requirements that are needed to make a school. It does not matter that the state has 70% of the school buildings dangerous for students: if you are a private individual you must ensure compliance. If you don't want to miss an important slice of students, even for handicapped students.

Then it is a question of furnishing them to be able to teach, for example. And you have to keep everything healthy and up to standard. Other expenses, plus bureaucracy.

Then you will have to keep everything warm, and you will also have to provide for cleaning. More obviously you will have the teachers' salary. Plus taxes.

If you do an online school, you need a 42U rack, servers, some firewalls, BOR switches, TOR switches, storage and connectivity. If you don't want to do it on premise, you can use a cloud of your choice, as long as it has a tenant in your country (for privacy).

At most, on the day of the exams you will have to rent a hotel hall to keep the writings and the oral papers. By now all hotels have a conference room, and the prices are quite approachable.

We are talking about savings ranging from ~ 80 to 90 ~ compared to the previous situation. And this 80.90% difference is the reason why the only private schools are in fact ecclesiastical properties: being exempt from taxes and being extraterritorial , their requirements (and related costs) are low.

Thus, distance learning makes MUCH less expensive to do private schools. But if we've looked at the cost of the offer, let's try to look at the demand.

Because if you run a private school today, you have two choices: buy / rent the building in the center, in a densely populated area, or lose the vast majority of students.

But even if you did it downtown (where the rent or the cost of the property would kill you), you will not go beyond the city where you are. If it's not great, gathering, say, 100 members will be very difficult. You will have a dozen, at most. And you don't pay us the expenses, even if they were so rich they could pay a lot.

Now let's go to a private digital school.

Which catchment area do you have? Well, you have practically all of Italy. Getting to 100 members / year, with a good advertising campaign, is not complicated. Here we start to reason.

You could also count which are the least popular high schools in the area, that is, the most difficult to reach on average. We are putting in place the saving of a few hours of local transport, or the renunciation of the boys to go to the school they prefer, and we are comparing it with the possibility of REALLY doing the school they want, without the problem “but nearby there is no 'is' ".

Now let's get on the family side. It is true that the little boy would be at home, but let's talk about high schools. Leaving a 14+ year old boy at home is not a problem.

But from the point of view of families, the discussion is:

1. we save on books. ~ 1000 euros per year which can be replaced by downloadable ebooks / PDFs. The history of the Romans does not change over time. Without the mafia of the publishing houses, the school can decide to use the same text for several years.
2. we save on transportation. There are families who only have two cars to take their children to school. Others whose children take buses, trains & anything else just to go to school every day. But given the state of public transport, this implies that the parent sacrifices himself for every strike / malfunction / weather event.
3. saving clothes. I tried the speech on my skin. The amount of clothes that a teenager requires to go to school and what it takes to stay at home are very different. Social pressure is completely different.
4. Social issues. If you are the parents of a child who lives in a school in one area, let's say, socially problematic (let's say the broad situation), perhaps you will envy schools in other areas. If you are a parent of a child from the south, and you read on TV that a gap with students from the north emerges on tests, you could consider sending the baby to a school in northern Italy. It is comprensible.

I'm not saying that this affects all families : thousands of Karen in the morning can't wait to take the SUV to take their son to school and vent their worst instincts on the way. And they like it.

But if it comes to gathering 100, 200 students / year all over Italy, you can do it easily, and you get away with a monthly fee that parents recover almost entirely among the accessory costs.

Also because if you follow the coursera method, with very few teachers you can do many classes, since you recycle the material (videos, documentation, handouts, etc)

In a nutshell, distance education scares state professors because it empowers private schools … to exist. And to compete with the public ones.

Universities are literally shitting underneath, and not for nothing are equipping almost all of them: they know that if, unfortunately, some foreign university started to really do distance learning, it would be very difficult to compete. You can be Bocconi as much as you want, but the student could now also choose the LSE, even if the family is not wealthy enough to keep it in London.

The transition is not ONLY material, it is cultural. LSE already does online degree courses, so to speak. But no one before had ever broken the cultural barrier. The online degree knows of "correspondence course".

But if this prejudice breaks, everything changes.

And with the coronavirus the prejudice broke.

And that's why they're literally shitting underneath .