The (ir)resistible acceleration of digital education. The emergence of the blended school form in a state of education emergency

Abstract

This article focuses on the recent acceleration of digital education triggered by the Covid19 pandemic. Protective measures, particularly the social distancing, translated into an institutional shock for the standard form of schooling. By drawing on a summary of current investigations on the topic (Brehm, Unterhalter & Oketch, 2021; Grek & Landri, 2021), the article describes how swift digitalization has reinforced the entanglement of public education into private owned and commercial platforms and paved the way to the emergence of the blended school form. The instabilities of the current process of institutional repair are underlined together with the risk of increasing unbalanced private and public partnership in the education system, and/or returning to the standard form of schooling in the future post-pandemic scenario.