This paper draws on current international analysis of pandemic issues in education, and on recent arguments by critical economists and political scientists, to examine two scenarios for educational policy beyond the coronavirus pandemic. One looming possibility is an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public education, financial hardship for the working and middle classes, and a range of private sector, including online answers to public problems in education, leading to more inequity, and an even wider digital divide. The pandemic, it is argued, is already being used as a strategy to bring about educational privatization by stealth by mismanaging return-to-school strategies and by overselling the effectiveness of online and private school alternatives. The alternative is public education investment to pursue prosperity and better quality of life for everyone. This will reduce inequality instead of increasing it, close the digital divide that COVID-19 has exposed, and encourage balanced technology use to enhance good teaching rather than hybrid or blended technology delivery that may increasingly replace such teaching.

本文借鉴了当前国际上对教育中流行病问题的分析，并借鉴了重要的经济学家和政治学家的最新观点，研究了除冠状病毒大流行之外的两种教育政策方案。一种迫在眉睫的可能性是紧缩政策的涌现，公共教育的大幅削减，工人阶级和中产阶级的财政困难以及一系列私营部门，包括在线解决教育中的公共问题，导致更多的不平等现象，以及更广泛的数字化划分。有人认为，这种流行病已被用作通过秘密管理返校战略以及过度推销在线和私立学校替代方案的有效性来实现教育私有化的战略。另一种选择是公共教育投资，以追求每个人的繁荣和更好的生活质量。这将减少不平等而不是增加不平等，弥合COVID-19暴露的数字鸿沟，并鼓励平衡的技术使用以增强良好的教学效果，而不是混合或混合的技术交付方式（可能会越来越多地替代此类教学方法）。