The family being a fundamental cultural device is not the one who should assume the responsibility of "educating", enough evidence raised in these days that makes manifest the difference between families and their "educating potential", the rooms, technologies, capacities are not distributed equitably. Society is responsible for educating its members.
The educational uses of technologies imply having the capacity to make good use of the resource. Our young people, the teachers have not been prepared to cope with spaces of formal instruction mediated by virtual environments, more complicated when who must support the study at home is "the family" that in many cases is deprived of pedagogical tools to meet this call.
Redefining the curriculum throughout the Venezuelan education system, providing curricular flexibility, thinking about its contextualization, I hope will be one of the great lessons for institutions, governments, managers and supporters after the pandemic.
The pedagogical relationship is central, the technological resources are a conjunctural means, therefore everything that is planned or organized must be considered temporary, preparatory, complementary, useful to better carry out the isolation, not as a school "task". It should not be planned as if it were the school placed on a digital platform.
Returning to classes does not guarantee a return to normality. What is recommended is an alternating and progressive re-entry calendar by levels; the re-entry should be centered on the person and his/her integral state, emotional and affective stabilization that ensures the physical and psychological health of students and teachers.
There are no uniform or replicable responses to the entire school population. The professional decisions of teachers must be trusted.
It is hasty to speculate about the return to normality, one must advance step by step, without haste, because for now the COVID-19 has only confirmed the profound educational inequalities that exist in Venezuela, the south of the lake and the entire world.
In the case of Mexico, more than 35 million students and two million teachers were suddenly deprived of the school space that is the educational place par excellence.
In the new circumstance, teachers and students have to communicate from their respective homes, instead of being at school. It is clear that this is a temporary resource and in no way a substitute for the school campus.
The possibility of using the Internet to teach is not new, it has been promoted since the golden age of dotcoms, since the late 1990s when someone following the spirit of the times.
For ten years we have lived with the idea of using the Net to teach, but, although the historical time is short, we have learned some lessons, and acquired some certainties in what it means to teach on the Net.
Distance education acquired a relevance that perhaps it had never had before. This modality of education is distinguished because it does not require the presence of students and teachers in the same space.
Distance education can be done by very different means. Decades ago, correspondence courses allowed for distance learning; the same happened with the delivery of notebooks that guided educational tasks. Later, radio and television were introduced; in our country, in a very outstanding way, with the telesecondary from 1968.
The accent is on the learner, but how do we learn from home? Is the mere presence of the computer and the creation of a site with content enough to allow for learning? Does reading interactive screens generate learning? Through the site, the official program proposes a battery of reading documents and links to proposals or activities for teachers.
The idea behind this is that students will sit in front of screens and read, and as they read, this flow of information will enrich their neural network.
Learning online is much more than reading; we must not confuse the informal learning that we can do for our own interest by searching for information on the Internet with the learning of specific content and skills proposed by the school.
It is necessary to train teachers who are able to carry out the task of teaching online as well. Then, it would be worth asking how the curricula of the Venezuelan education system have been modified at all levels to ensure that teachers who are being trained today have the necessary skills to think about teaching in online environments.
In recent decades, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have gained an increasingly important place in distance education. ICTs have advantages over other media because they offer instantaneous two-way communication, in audio, video and data. Also, unlike traditional media, ICTs allow access to virtually unlimited content, virtual conversations between multiple people, diverse tools and remote data processing, among other advantages. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that distance education is now associated with ICTs and that traditional media are lagging behind.
Online education not only serves to solve problems such as the current health emergency, but can also serve to solve a much more serious and permanent problem: by providing online learning spaces, teachers can decompress and reduce tensions in their moments of interaction in the classroom to take advantage of those moments of contact with students to strengthen the teacher-student, adult-adolescent bond and recreate the link between students and the educational institution. This requires systematic and constant work, reforms and commitment, which for the moment only a few teachers with altruistic humanism and individual will have undertaken in the south of the lake from UNESUR for Venezuela and the world.
