The day the Ministry of Education announced the extended winter break, I saw social media flooded with cheers: “No school!” “Learning from home is awesome!”

As a parent, my reaction was cold sweat.

Because I knew what was coming. Not a pleasant extended holiday, but a war we were utterly unprepared for—a family resource consumption battle testing hardware, space, logistics, and willpower.

Concerts Cannot Be Replaced by Music Videos

Let me start with a basic fact: online learning is not a “more convenient way to attend classes.” It’s a compromise. A compromise we had to accept for epidemic prevention.

It’s like buying tickets to a Mayday concert, only to have the organizers tell you: “Watching music videos at home has nearly the same effect!” If online could truly replace offline, why would Andy Lau cancel over ten concerts and bear enormous financial losses?

Learning is the same. Classrooms have teachers’ visual management, peer interaction stimulation, social functions during breaks, and the psychological cue of “leaving home”—this spatial transition that signals your brain to switch to “learning mode.”

These elements cannot be replaced by a laptop and a Zoom link.

Those who advocate “online learning is better than in-person” either don’t have children, or have never personally sat beside their child monitoring a full day of online classes.

A Naked Resource Game

The most brutal aspect of “school closure, not learning closure” isn’t declining learning quality—that’s just surface level. What’s truly brutal is how it overnight exposed all family resource gaps that were previously masked by the school system.

Hardware costs. Online learning requires stable internet and functional devices. If your family only has one aging laptop and two children’s class schedules overlap, what do you do? When internet is unstable, it’s like diving without an oxygen tank—you know you should breathe, but you can’t.

Space costs. Home is a place for relaxation. Opening textbooks on the sofa sends the brain a “rest” signal, not “learn.” To give our child a focused environment, we even tried renting coworking spaces for classes. That’s additional cost, and not every family can afford it.

Logistics costs. For dual-income families without grandparent support, children attending classes at home means what? It means one adult must sacrifice work to supervise. What about lunch? Cook all three meals yourself? If you order takeout and the child gets sick for two days, that’s another hidden cost.

Mental costs. This is the least discussed yet most deadly. You simultaneously play parent, teacher, IT support, and counselor. You still have your own work. Your mental energy is being consumed by multitasking. And—no one will thank you.

I discussed the challenges of self-directed education in “The Gentle Resistance of Homeschooling.” But at least homeschooling is a parent’s active choice with psychological preparation. Pandemic-driven online learning is forced, with most families completely unprepared.

A Mirror Revealing Digital Divide

If your family is in Taipei City with stable internet, adequate equipment, a dedicated study room, and one parent able to work from home while supervising children—online learning might just be “somewhat inconvenient.”

But if your family is in a remote area with intermittent internet, sharing one phone among everyone, both parents needing to work outside, and no quiet corner at home—online learning becomes a joke. It’s not that children don’t want to learn; the environment simply doesn’t allow it.

This isn’t a personal problem—it’s a structural one.

One function of the education system is using public resources to level differences between families—regardless of your family’s wealth, at school everyone uses the same classroom and listens to the same teacher. This “leveling” is imperfect, but it exists.

Online learning directly removes this function. Learning quality depends entirely on your family’s resources. Resource-rich families turn online learning into “personalized education opportunities,” while resource-poor families struggle with basic class participation.

School closure, not learning closure—it’s learning closure for disadvantaged families.

Parents’ Counterattack: Building Our Own Management Systems

Complaints aside, we still must face reality. If online learning becomes a recurring scenario in the future—not just pandemics, but typhoons, earthquakes, or even some normalized hybrid learning model—parents cannot passively wait for schools to provide solutions. We must build our own management systems.

My own trial-and-error approach:

Design daily self-evaluation forms. Have children assess three things after each class: How much did I understand? How was my focus? Was video conferencing effective for this class? This isn’t about pressuring children, but helping them develop awareness of their learning state.

Require written output. After each day’s classes, write three to five sentences about what they learned today. It doesn’t need to be long, but they must write it themselves—no copy-paste. This action forces children to transform “passive reception” into “active organization.”

Maintain physical rhythm. This is the most overlooked yet most critical element. Home classes easily lead to sitting all day with disrupted schedules. Exercise at fixed times, eat at fixed times, turn off computers at fixed times—maintain bodily rhythm so the brain can maintain learning rhythm.

These practices aren’t profound theories, just survival strategies from a parent’s repeated trial and error on the frontlines.

Don’t Depend on the Enemy Not Coming

In “The End of Solo Performers: Seeing the Real Battlefield of Group Education Through Ironman Triathlon,” I discussed how real education isn’t just knowledge transmission, but learning collaboration and rhythm coordination in groups. Online learning’s greatest loss may not be knowledge-level regression, but forcing children to face screens alone during ages when they most need social interaction.

The pandemic will eventually pass. But the problems it exposed won’t automatically disappear.

Online learning isn’t a scourge, but it’s definitely not some educational utopia of the future. It’s a tool—one requiring extensive supporting systems to function. And those supporting systems—hardware, space, logistics, parents’ time and energy—are essentially all resources.

If the future world has children learning online from home half the time, parents must develop early awareness about their attitude toward education and environmental arrangements.

Don’t depend on the enemy not coming; depend on having preparations to meet them. This isn’t just military strategy—it’s a survival principle for parenting.