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Productive Work Time

Throughout recent times, where many people have been working from home, many office workers reported being more productive at work while being forced to work from their own homes, owing partly to spending less time commuting, but also as a result of a more effective use of time actually working. For some, remote working is just another day at the office, as thousands of workers, for example in the Netherlands, already benefited from the country’s astonishingly flexible work culture.1 Results of a US poll, conducted mid-crisis, suggested that 59% of remote workers would prefer to keep on working remotely as far as possible, once restrictions on businesses and school closures are fully lifted.2 Major international companies such as Barclays have already suggested that expensive city office space might become a thing of the past.3 In 2020 Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, told his employees that they might remain working from home forever after the pandemic, in a forward-thinking and unprecedented statement that influenced other companies to extend their own ‘work-from-home’ guidelines.4 If the key to survival is adapting to one's environment, flexibility should perhaps also be thoroughly investigated for school environments. Where innovative and industrious teachers are successful at influencing policymakers in redesigning their respective national curriculums, that is where we will be able to observe the survival of the fittest teaching methods.

Man makes notes on a coffee table during work from home. Coffee in background.

Working from Home

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Self-Discipline

Alt text: On the left, a filtered portrait picture in a gradient colour scheme from green to yellow on a black background of Elbert Hubbard. Hubbard is looking to the far right with a very serious facial expression. To his right is his quote; "Self discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not". The quote is written in yellow, bold, lower case letters on the black background.

Elbert Hubbard

A great deal of self-discipline has been demanded of the students all around the world who have had to work more independently in varying kinds of distance learning set-ups during the pandemic. Certainly, there is great variety in how teenagers can deal with the level of time management, workload division, and segmentation that is necessary to succeed with their studies. We would suggest that this is an ability that the students need to be taught in order for education to be more equal, regardless of how much parents are able or willing to help. We might be able to learn some of this from South Korea, where students apparently display a higher level of self-efficacy and have stronger beliefs in their own abilities and therefore perform better in for example mathematics.5 Professor Heeok Heo suggests that this ability might stem partly from the Confucianist traditions of Korea.6

Furthermore, teaching materials desperately need to be much better adapted to the young people of today. An exponential evolution of interactive and interesting teaching resources and student material is vital to the progress of a more flexible education system. Teenagers can play computer games for days without being prompted at all, so the teaching material of the immediate future must adapt to a similar level of involvement and fascination. The interactive segments of this learning experience should also include hands-on learning activities and even physical education. In other words, in the current context of the future of education, the idea of gamification of education does not seem as far-fetched as it used to be.

  1. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200623-what-the-dutch-can-teach-the-world-about-remote-work.
  2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/306695/workers-discovering-affinity-remote-work.aspx .
  3. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52467965.
  4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/05/13/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-tells-employees-they-can-work-from-home-forever-before-you-celebrate-theres-a-catch/#3644738d2e91.
  5. See lecture by Professor Okhwa Lee, https://ju.se/download/18.12381a76149cd828a5a1e7ca/1520578500984/Okhwa%20Lee%20The%20education%20in%20Korea.%20What%20does%20it%20look%20like.pdf.
  6. In Heo, H., Sydkoreansk utbildning, några utmärkande drag (South Korean Education, some Unique Characteristics), in Lee, O. and Kroksmark, T., Världens bästa undervisning (The Best Education in the World), Studentlitteratur, Lund, 2017, p.54.