Valentina Auer

With the beginning of 2020 a big disruption took place: the corona virus spread across all over the world. Suddenly time stood still, a pandemic was happening, and nothing was ever like it has been before. People had to isolate, to stay at home and everything was closed for a while. Now of course this also applied to schools, kindergartens, nurseries and universities. Suddenly, every family had to home educate their children. The idea of de-schooling the school system became reality over-night. Home educating families were now the perfect source of knowledge and offered a lot of tips to families with schooled children. The circumstances revealed that school is an important place for children, sometimes the only safe place. They missed their friends, teacher and also the daily structure and routine. Parents were challenged during these times, but teacher had to adapt very quickly as well. Beside the important community factor of school it also revealed a lot of inequalities that are happening within the system. Children weren´t able to attend online classes ore access materials to learn due to no internet connection or lack of electronic devices. Other suffered from not being able to focus on studying at home because of family issues or lack of private space. But without any doubt children learned a lot during these times, even if they weren´t connected to their teachers or had access to study material. They could develop their own interests, start with hobbies they otherwise wouldn´t have time to do. They also gained a lot of skills in organizing and structuring their day which probably made them more independent. Covid-19 has changed the view on school for most people and opened a lot of discussions for future development. Hopefully, there will be a change in the system, but since education is very political it is uncertain if it will be a priority after this pandemic crisis. Driven by this it is even more motivating and necessary for design to accept the challenge of changing the education system.