How do we make sociological sense of the fact that the ‘new normal’ is turning out to be little more than a sheepish reversion to the old normal?

It goes without saying that the COVID pandemic and subsequent global education shut-downs were of immense sociological significance. The prolonged periods when schools, colleges and universities were rendered physically inaccessible highlighted limitations in many of our established academic understandings about education. Particularly during the early stages of the pandemic, it also felt extremely difficult to form new understandings around what was taking place. Events progressed so rapidly that by the time any scholarly analysis was published it often appeared hopelessly behind-the-curve. As David Beer reflected during May 2020, “it’s hard to do sociology and social science when you aren’t quite sure what the social is and how it is working”.

Such uncertainties notwithstanding, the education shutdowns of 2020 and 2021 did prompt a widely-held view that we would never fully return to how things were in pre-pan- demic times. Indeed, the pandemic surfaced various long-festering educational tensions and fault lines, thereby raising expectations of significant lasting transformation to educa- tion. Some commentators were confidently anticipating a complete institutional renewal via the ‘death of school’ and/or collapsing demand for university education. Many others were less gung-ho, but still anticipated the emergence of a notably different ‘new normal’. All told, as it became clear that we had seen the last of the lockdowns it felt highly likely that the sociology of education would be rethought and reframed through the lens of the pandemic for years to come.

Fast-forward to the present moment, however, and the idea of a major post-COVID educational reset now seems considerably less certain. Indeed, it feels that the vast majority of the world has spent the past two years determinately working to move on from any pandemicconcerns. Although the World Health Organisation waited until May 2023 to declare COVID ended as a global public health emergency, most people were already long-accus- tomed to talking about the pandemic being ‘over’, or else avoiding any mention of COVID at all. All told, COVID seems to have firmly been pushed to the back of our collective consciousness, replaced by a wilful desire to return to pre-pandemic routines and rituals as quickly as possible.

This collective will to forget has certainly been evident throughout education, with initial trepidations soon sidelined by a passive acceptance of the need to reconvene in-person classes and face-to-face provision where-ever possible. Early concerns over whole- class masking, social distancing, air-purification, teacher long COVID and trauma-informed pedagogy have all been quietly dropped. Similarly, there is now little talk of shifts to ‘hy-flex’ provision, a middle-class migration to private tutoring, and other seismic trans- formations that were being touted during the 2020 and 2021 upheavals as likely long-term possibilities.

Against this background, then, one of the key questions that sociologists of education now need to be asking is what has actually changed as a consequence of the pandemic? Allied to this is the more telling question of what our societies have seemingly not been to prepared to learn from COVID? For instance, even though the pandemic saw the wholesale cancellation of high-stakes examinations and testing, what happened to the idea of school systems making a permanent break free from examinations and standardised assessments? What happened to the expectation that policymakers and parents would have enduring respect for teachers and/or genuine empathy for student trauma? Why did the much-mooted disruptions, revolutions and ruptures not occur – from the humanist dreams of new caring-focused forms of learning provision, to the brash market-driven forecasts of online tutoring ‘disrupting’ public schooling? What structural forces snapped education back so quickly into line? In short, how do we make sociological sense of the fact that the ‘new normal’ is turning out to be little more than a sheepish reversion to the old normal?

NOTE: This is an excerpt from a new book review in the British Journal of Sociology of Education