Five years ago today, on 13 March 2025, Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez declared the state of emergency, in view of the alarming expansion of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causing Covid-19. Today, many other persons and media are considering the impact of the pandemic on our lives and, in particular, on education. I don’t have anything to contribute of special significance, but I feel this is a day to try to remember two things: the virus is now endemic but the pandemic is not really over, and the effects on the younger generation in our classrooms is still manifest and will take years to eradicate.
I’m not checking bibliography, online or otherwise, for this post because there is enough for a thousand doctoral dissertations. I just want to offer my own impressions, as I did when I wrote back in 2020 and 2021 about the worst effects of Covid-19 on higher education teaching. A colleague told me optimistically a few days ago that the crisis will necessarily be over next year, when we finally welcome students who were not in our classrooms during Covid-19, but I’m not sure this is the case. At this point, I don’t know which children were not significantly affected by lockdown. For the sake of argumentation, I’ll suppose that primary school children (6 to 11 years of age), and younger children, were not deeply affected, and that those beginning secondary education (at 12) and older children were significantly affected. Supposing I’m right, the youngest persons to endure deep mental stress due to the pandemic were born in 2008, and are now 17. They are the ones that will enter university this September, which means we still have to face a minimum of four more years of post-pandemic troubles.
Re-reading my posts of 2020 and 2021 in preparation for a book based on selections from this blog, what strikes me is how scared I was at the time, and how fiercely I resisted returning to class. Like most people around me, I have blocked the details and the memories of that traumatic time, which is good for survival, but at the same time unfair to those who bore the brunt of healthcare, indispensable economic activity and government. I feel safe now, and totally unconcerned by Covid-19, but it has taken a long time to feel that safety, aided by the four vaccine shots I took.
I never doubted for a moment the gravity of the situation though, happily, my family went through the pandemic with very little trouble, and I myself was never infected; in fact, I didn’t even take a test, leading after lockdown a very quiet life. I give credit to the government for having done the best that could be done in the circumstances, and I thank from the bottom of my heart the scientists who developed the vaccines. I had a good cry reading the memoir Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Katalin Karikó, one of the main discoverers. We seem to believe that an anonymous ‘they’ quickly came up with solutions to stop the virus, but it took exceptional talent and hard work to understand it and work on the vaccines. I just wish the same method could be applied to healing us from other diseases and from solving other obstacles now making life on Earth so destructive and disappointing.
I am one of those persons who feels nostalgic for lockdown. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I was so scared that at one point I fainted, the only time in my life I have spontaneously lost consciousness. This was in May, two months into lockdown, possibly because I didn’t see when it would end, which was the hardest part of the whole process. When I say that I feel nostalgia, I mean that my memories of lockdown are paradoxically peaceful. I do know that many people died and others were left impaired for life, and that many workers were exposed to lethal danger. Privileged persons like myself and my husband could go on working from home thanks to them.
I was already working from home three days a week, and teaching at UAB two, and so lockdown was not as disruptive as it was for my husband, who used to spend three weeks each month abroad, or for so many other people. What makes me feel nostalgic is the sudden quiet that fell on big cities like Barcelona, where I live, and the sense of community that made us cheer health workers every evening at 20:00, hypocritically or not. I had a true hope that Covid-19 would make us reconsider the fragility of life on planet Earth, but this is not what has happened. Instead, our mad consumerism has trebled and the most unhinged rule the planet, stimulated by the dark philosophies that spread like wildfire, from the covidiot antivaxxers to the downright fascists.
Education could have been boosted by lockdown and the hesitant, spotty return to school, given the enhanced opportunities to fill in empty time with books, films, series, and the avalanche of online culture poured on us by musicians, poets, actors and all kinds of performers, either live or recorded. I’ve never seen so much theatre and ballet in my life… What happened instead, so the young tell us, is that they felt cut off from each other and have never recovered from that necessary isolation.
You would have thought that a generation raised on social media would be used to keeping in touch at a distance, but this is not what happened. I recall my eldest niece, then 14, and spending a year away from home in Canada, complaining that her adolescence would be ruined, as if not only a few months but years had been taken away from socializing. Something truly deep and dark did happen, though, for I have discovered last semester that many students in my class had never spoken to their peers, despite having spent four years seeing each other daily as undergrads. From this perspective, my forcing them to spend forty minutes each session talking to at least three or four other classmates must have seemed extraordinary (or excruciating) to them.
Covid-19 felt apocalyptic at the start. It was the pandemic that, as so many dystopian narratives had foretold, would wipe us out. We were lucky that it didn’t, but must not forget that any day now a new pandemic might carry us away into eternal oblivion. I understand that for the young persons awakening to teen life in 2020, the crisis must have seemed even more catastrophic; the young cared, above all, for the damage done to the expectations they entertained about their teen years but they also sensed the any promising future was receding.
As an adult born in 1966, I’ve had this feeling many times, most particularly in 1984, when I truly believed that nuclear war would begin any random day, and then again in 2001, when I watched live on TV the Islamic radical attacks against the Twin Towers in New York. Then came the 2008 financial crash. I recall being one day in a shop, thinking of buying an expensive shampoo because it seemed that, finally, I could afford stupid luxuries, and the next thing I know, the government was cutting our wages (which, by the way, have never been returned). Those born in 2008 could have no memory of this sudden loss of future expectations that those born in 1990 must have felt then, when they hit 18. For those who faced Covid-19, that was the end, if not of the world, certainly of their world.
I have heavily criticised in this blog how poorly online teaching replaced face-to-face teaching, resulting in a nonchalant attitude to education which has increased absenteeism beginning with very young schoolchildren. It is in many ways miraculous that schools did not close, and we need to be thankful that online services and home computer equipment were, in most cases, up to the challenge, though I can’t forget the many children with no PC or laptop, or no bandwidth. I wrote here, perhaps a bit callously, that studying today can only be done with that kind of equipment and a good internet connection, and I was truly dismayed to see that not all our university students enjoyed that at home. By 2020, subscription to internet services was not as expensive as it used to be in previous decades, but the difficulties of so many students indicated that the 2008 crisis had hit truly hard most working-class homes. With no libraries to access wi-fi for free, many students were lost to each other and to their teachers.
I have no doubt that the greatest impact Covid-19 has had on the young is a permanent sense of uncertainty. I have always felt uncertain about the future because I was a child during the Spanish transition, and a teen during the end of Cold War. I think I have only felt minimally safe in the 1990s, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., even though clearly many areas of the world were going through war and extreme economic distress. With Putin threatening WWIII and the effects of climate change, I no longer feel safe, but, then, I’m 58 and I have lived so far a satisfactory life.
If I were at an age somewhere between 17 and 25, I would not know what to do. What I see in class is, precisely, disorientation, scepticism, anxiety and, in the worst-case scenario, depression. My generation was the last to believe that if you work hard, you will be rewarded. Those hit by the 2008 recession are now facing the reality that their generation is poorer than us, the baby boomers, and have grown sceptical about the future. If they were already parents by 2008, their children are the ones who faced Covid-19 as tweens, so you can imagine the weight of the generational disappointment.
Many days I grow impatient with my students’ disinterest, lack of curiosity and general disregard for academic life. I feel that, in comparison to my own generation, which struggled to overcome the aftermath of Francoism, they have so much more to be happy about. Or content. As an undergrad, I would have been totally amazed by the possibilities that the internet and the digital technologies offer to learn, but for the younger generation their very smartphones have become a source of distress and even of enslavement to needs regulated by greedy corporations. If education cannot offer a way to a brilliant future because politics, climate change or another random pandemic could destroy it, why bother? Add to this that I work in a public university at a time when meritocracy seems to have reached a limit and when there is little chance that working-class children can climb up the social ladder. The many private universities opening in the community of Madrid are the clearest sign that this hope is now over.
Things are bleak, let’s be honest, and I have not even mentioned what is happening in the USA, where an antivaxxer is now Secretary for Health. If a new pandemic strikes Earth, great segments of the US population might be wiped out, now that is the nation is no longer affiliated with WHO. This blatant, criminal, self-genocidal disregard of the lessons Covid-19 taught us and the brutal onslaught against public education at all levels that president Trump is unleashing are more bricks in the wall stopping current civilization from progressing. We will all be affected.
My hope is that seeing civil rights attacked in the most powerful nation in the world might galvanize our local students into action, to protect privileges they don’t know they have, like that of freely expressing their opinions, engaging in activism of any kind, having a good public system of education and health, having their gender choices respected… It might not be sufficient at a personal level, but it’s the foundation for a good communal future. I hope they see this truth and that they soon leave behind the fog of Covid-19 for a much brighter future.