Complexities of difference and their significance for managing inequality in learning: Lessons from the COVID-19 crisis

The purpose of this Viewpoint is to argue for an enlarged understanding and approach to the question of inequality and education. While much of the current discussion is correctly focused on learners’ material realities and how COVID-19 is exacerbating those inequalities, largely overlooked is how the core activity of the education experience—learning—is managed, simultaneously, at the macro-level of the state, and the micro-levels of the individual learner. We now know how complex learning is. Our new knowledge is informed by new understandings of the relationship between the biomedical and the social. It is suggested that what is necessary in this crisis and going into the future, is deconstructing and making sense of the complexities of these realities for the quality of the learning experience.