The day the Ministry of Education announced an extended winter break, I saw social media erupt with cheers: “No more school!” “Learning from home is awesome!”
As a parent, my reaction was a cold sweat.
Because I knew what was coming next. Not a pleasant long vacation, but a war we were completely unprepared for — a war of attrition over family resources, measured by hardware, space, logistics, and willpower.
A Concert Can’t Be Replaced by a Music Video
Let’s start with the most basic fact: online learning is not “a more convenient way to attend class” — it’s a compromise we were forced to accept for the sake of pandemic prevention.
It’s like buying tickets to a Mayday concert, only to have the organizers tell you: “Watching the music videos at home is pretty much the same!” If online really could replace the in-person experience, why would Andy Lau cancel more than a dozen concerts and absorb enormous financial losses?
Learning is the same. The classroom has the teacher’s managing gaze, the stimulus of interaction with classmates, the social function of recess, and the psychological cue that comes from the spatial transition of “leaving home” — when you arrive at school, your brain knows it’s time to switch into “learning mode.”
A laptop and a Zoom link can’t replace these things.
The people championing “online learning is better than in-person” either don’t have kids, or have never personally sat beside a child watching over a full day of online classes.
A Raw Resource Game
The cruelest part of “classes suspended, learning continues” isn’t the decline in learning quality — that’s just the surface. The truly cruel part is this: it took the family resource gaps that the school system had been masking and laid them all out in broad daylight overnight.
Hardware costs. Online learning requires a stable network and usable equipment. If the household has only one aging laptop, what happens when two children’s class times overlap? When the network 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 to relax. Opening a textbook on the couch, the brain receives the signal “rest,” not “learn.” To give the kids an environment where they could concentrate, we even tried renting a separate shared space for them to attend class. That’s an additional cost, and not every family can afford it.
Logistics costs. For a dual-income family with no support from grandparents, what does it mean for kids to attend class at home? It means one adult must sacrifice their work to supervise. What about lunch? Do you have to cook all three meals yourself? If you order takeout and the kids get sick for two days and can’t attend class, that’s another hidden cost.
Mental costs. This is the least mentioned, yet the most lethal. You’re simultaneously playing parent, teacher, IT support, and counselor. Your own work still has to get done. Your mind is being consumed across multiple threads. And — no one will thank you for it.
In “The Gentle Resistance of Homeschooling” I discussed the challenges of self-directed education. But at least homeschooling is a choice parents actively make, with psychological preparation. Pandemic-era online learning was forced upon us, and most families were utterly unprepared.
A Mirror Revealing the Digital Divide
If your home is in Taipei, with a stable network, sufficient equipment, an independent study, and one parent who can work from home and supervise the kids on the side — online learning might just be “a bit inconvenient.”
But if your home is in a remote rural area, with intermittent network connectivity, the whole family sharing a single phone, both parents having to go out to work, and no quiet corner anywhere in the house — online learning is a joke. It’s not that the children don’t want to learn; it’s that the environment simply doesn’t allow it.
This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a structural one.
One of the functions of the education system is to use public resources to level the gaps between families — regardless of whether your family is rich or poor, once you arrive at school, everyone uses the same classroom and listens to the same teacher. This “leveling” is of course imperfect, but at least it exists.
Online learning strips this function away entirely. Learning quality depends completely on your family’s resources. Families with resources turn online learning into “an opportunity for personalized education,” while families without resources struggle even with basic class participation.
“Classes suspended, learning continues” — what gets suspended is the learning of disadvantaged families.
The Parents’ Counterattack: Building Your Own Management System
Complain all we want, we still have to face reality. If online learning is going to become a recurring scenario in the future — not just pandemics, but typhoons, earthquakes, and even some kind of normalized hybrid learning model down the road — parents can’t passively wait for the school to provide a solution. We have to build our own management systems.
The approaches I worked out for myself:
Design a daily self-assessment sheet. Have the child evaluate three things after each class: How much did I understand? How was my focus? Did this class work well over video? This isn’t about putting pressure on the child, but about helping them build awareness of their own learning state.
Require written output. After classes end each day, write down what they learned today in three to five sentences. It doesn’t have to be long, but they have to write it themselves — no copy-pasting. This action forces the child to transform “passive reception” into “active organization.”
Maintain a physical rhythm. This is the most easily overlooked, yet the most crucial. Attending class at home, it’s easy to sit all day without moving and let your routine fall apart. Exercise at a fixed time, eat at a fixed time, turn off the computer at a fixed time — maintain the body’s rhythm, and only then can the brain maintain the rhythm of learning.
These approaches aren’t some profound theory. They’re survival strategies a parent worked out through repeated trial and error on the front line.
Do Not Count on the Enemy Not Coming
In “The End of the Solitary Runner: The Real Battlefield of Group Education Through the Lens of Triathlon,” I discussed how true education isn’t just the transmission of knowledge — it also includes learning to collaborate within a group and learning to match a collective rhythm. The greatest loss of online learning may not be falling behind at the knowledge level, but that children, at the very age when they most need social interaction, are forced to face a screen alone.
The pandemic will eventually pass. But the problems it exposed won’t vanish on their own.
Online learning is neither a fearsome monster nor, by any means, some educational utopia of the future — it’s a tool, a tool that requires a great deal of supporting infrastructure to function. And those supports — hardware, space, logistics, parents’ time and energy — are all, in essence, resources.
If, in the world to come, children spend half their time learning online at home, parents’ mindset toward education and their arrangement of the environment must reach awareness ahead of time.
Do not count on the enemy not coming; count on our own readiness to meet them. This isn’t just the art of war — it’s a survival code for parenting.
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