Will The Pandemic Permanently Change Education In Australia And Democracy In Australia?

 This pandemic has been, on a purely sociological and historical level, a rather interesting time. Please do not mistake the sentiment for me disregarding the tragedies that this event has wrought. Lives have been lost, families have been ripped apart, careers have crumbled and stress has been through the roof. Believe me, I don’t consider this pandemic in any way a good thing, and any ultimately-positive changes made in light of it do not justify the horrors that followed in its shadow.

That said, I do want to point out that a major change to education in Australia has come about as a result of this pandemic, and in an isolated perspective, not considering the horror that wrought this change, it is most likely a positive change for the future. As for democracy in Australia, I expect there to be major concerns when it comes to voter security, much as there has been in the United States and Great Britain of late. These are actually very separate issues, but for the sake of inclusiveness, were going to try to discuss them independently and one piece today first, let’s get the ramifications on democracy in Australia out of the way first. Then we’ll get to the positive one, education.

Security and possibly a change in law?

The way votes are tallied, calculated and awarded in Australia may change severely alongside an increase in security majors, let’s be honest. While there haven’t been nearly as many alleged scandals about voter fraud, errors or whatnot is or have been in the United States due to their mid-pandemic recent election, or similar issues in Britain, we certainly don’t want this happening here.

With the pandemic basically doing some Pavlovian training on people to make them want to use the Internet for as many solutions as possible, expect digital voting to be the way of the future, and all manner of procedural nonsense making it a pain in the butt to actually use. Expect multi-step verification processes and authentication processes, and expect the very rules by which votes are tallied to change as a result, possibly for the better as a pure majority rule may soon apply to how a candidate wins an election.

I certainly know that Americans are hoping for a similar shift in their country as well, and I can’t doubt that my brethren in the UK feel any differently!

Education turned on its nose?

Education is a different beast. The changes in education have largely been in a similar forms of the changes made to a lot of professional life. The days of requiring people to commute to offices to do their jobs are coming to an end, and the same can be said for education. There is going to most likely be an ongoing push for telecommuting for school, with perhaps a single day a week for social interaction between the students.

Provided computing infrastructure and laptops can be made sufficiently available, this will also make solid, standardized education more uniformly available to the children of Australia. Education is a notoriously stubborn industry, having been unwilling to move away from its Prussian schoolhouse routes for the past nearly 500 years. The fact that in the environment is forcing it to adapt means that, perhaps in the future, better approaches to education being discovered in recent years may also find their ways into the future digital Australian classroom. Education in Australia may be better than it ever was before by the end.