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The design of the educational system was built to solve an obvious challenge of its time: the scarcity of knowledge.
Let us travel back a few centuries. Imagine living in a village somewhere in the UK. In such a setting, you would have had no books, no access to scientific expertise, and no information beyond what your village could provide.
Books were scarce; professors were scarce; access to knowledge or scientific expertise was scarce. Universities emerged as physical centers to gather, preserve, and transfer knowledge from one generation to another. If you wanted to study philosophy, medicine, or mathematics, you needed to travel to places such as Harvard, Oxford, Bologna, or Heidelberg. These institutions became the tangible infrastructures through which knowledge could be accessed.
Even today, this structure has changed very little. Buildings, lecture halls, and standardized curricula are still largely based on the assumption that information must be carefully transmitted in a specific physical location, from an expert to a student, within a defined period of time.
Education, at its core, was a system designed for scarcity. But the world that created this system no longer exists.
The internet disrupted this structure. Suddenly, information escaped physical locations. Research became digitized, expertise became searchable, and lectures from the world’s leading universities became accessible from remote locations across the globe. Yet universities themselves changed very little. Students still sit in classrooms to access information that is already available online, while memorization continues to dominate large parts of the evaluation system.
I grew up in post-communist Albania. Between the paradox of being and not being, having and not having. Between order and chaos, collapse and reinvention.
In March 1997, what we still call “Rremujat” – “the Disorder” began.
It is difficult to describe it to someone that did not live through it. I sometimes describe it as a civil war, although this is not quite accurate as there were no opposing groups, frontlines or ideology to protect. Just pure chaos. The government fell. Weapons were looted from military depots. Armed groups appeared everywhere. Institutions stopped functioning. Buildings were vandalized. Gunfire became part of everyday life.
I was in third grade when schools closed overnight. There were continuous shootings in the streets and going outside was not safe. We stayed home. Everyone we knew stayed home. In some ways it was similar to the first days of covid lockdown, except of the gunshots. Gunshots during the day; gunshots during the night; gunshots when we woke up; gunshots when we went to bed.
At this moment, something extraordinary happened. Every morning, the national television station began broadcasting school lessons. A teacher would stand in front of a blackboard explaining mathematics, reading, history. At nine o’clock there might be a math lesson for seventh grade students. At ten, grammar lessons for younger children. The curriculum continued as if the country itself had not collapsed.
At the time, I did not fully understand the significance of what I was watching. To me, it simply felt normal that school should somehow continued. But when I return to this memory today, what strikes me is not the educational improvisation itself. It is the symbolism of it.
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