Adapting to the circumstances: how to keep studies in atypical times like the one we live in?

 The year 2020 has been an amazing year in many ways, and for most people in the world, a year that has brought new social and individual challenges not seen in recent history.

Among these challenges we have had an impact on education, classes were interrupted, schools were closed, research was paralyzed ... not counting congresses and seminars that were also mobilized. And what was possible to be accomplished at a distance was adapted and accomplished for the current circumstance. But it is essential to say that the experience is not the same. The impact this educational gap will have on societies will be immense.

However, it is also a moment of reflection to readapt, resilience has never been more tested than it is today, and things will never be the same after that. In times of crisis, actions are taken so quickly that they make us wonder why changes were not made before, in ordinary times. Within resilience, students in the final stages of education in high school, higher education and academics in general, a quest or should be in achieving the ability to be self-taught. In Brazil, in particular, I say from my own experience that the goal of schools is not to make people capable of seeking knowledge for themselves, of producing what is new, of becoming critical. For the most part, we are trained to achieve certain goals, such as passing a certain entrance exam or contest. This attitude is not insufficient for education to be a little less impacted.

Talking to Brazilian scholars and teachers, I was able to analyze that adapting to the digital environment at the time of studying and teaching is a great challenge for some, impacting the performance of both the student and the teacher. It is a more comfortable modality in some aspects and even possible to introduce new elements for teaching, but the deficit is still expected.

In the conversation, what I could see is that although there are many people who have not been able to work in education, there are also people who recognize this as an opportunity as well. Nicholas, who is starting a master's degree in Russia, for example, saw his plans there disrupted by the pandemic. The way found by the university where he will study economics was online classes. An attitude that many universities and schools have adopted successfully and others less so. But what I could see in the interview is that this type of class has been proven for him, the comfort at low cost, the possibility of being able to resist classes, asking questions to teachers and etc., today provide Nicholas with the ability to absorb much more of this experience, even in circumstances like these.

Professor Lucas Casemiro, on the other hand, has a difficulty in relation to the distance of the students, to the atmosphere of a classroom, where there is a direct interaction with the students. Obviously he recognizes the ability to convey some ideas that can be illustrated more clearly using tools from the digital world, but he can clearly see in the performance of students that the performance is still not so good. This may change over time, stress the teacher, but it will depend on the ability of each to readapt, to be resilient, to see new challenges as an opportunity to develop. In practice, this seems simple to do, but the reality of each is understandable as a determining factor in achieving possible resilience.

In your text What is Clarification? Immanuel Kant talks about leaving a state of intellectual minority. This would be able through a search for enlightenment, a search for intellectual progress that would affect not only the individual who set out to do so, but also the whole of society. The search for enlightenment, Kant, is not just a search for knowledge alone, but for the exercise of being critical, the exercise of thinking, leaving aside one of the causes he mentions, which would be convenience, which in recent months can having been or will become the reality of many cases that resolved or had to stop due to the circumstances and that will therefore have a difficulty in returning to the activities they had at other times towards the search for knowledge. And it is understood here that this search for knowledge is not an exclusive attitude of research, but something of society, which will greatly impact the future of education.

We as a society can adapt to get where we are, it would not be impossible to do even in circumstances like the one we live in. An example of this is that at other times of crisis, such as the great wars, there was a quick search for adaptation in several countries involved in the conflict, and this adaptation resulted years in progress in several areas. In other words, it is up to us, in the search for this intellectual age, to seek to understand and make the best use of this moment in question.