Zoom

What Covid-19 Taught Us About Being Human

In March 2020, the world did something it had never done before. It went inside. Schools closed in 186 countries. Offices emptied overnight. And within weeks, over a billion people were conducting the whole of their lives, their work, their learning, their grief, their celebrations, through a rectangle of light on a screen.

The platform that absorbed most of this was called Zoom. In December 2019, it had ten million daily users. By April 2020, it had three hundred million. Its valuation exceeded a hundred billion dollars. It became, in the space of a few months, not merely a product but a verb, a noun, a shorthand for an entirely new mode of human existence. We zoomed into meetings. We zoomed into classrooms. We zoomed into birthday parties and memorial services and doctor’s appointments and first dates.

And then, quietly, in the middle of all of it, something unexpected happened. The world began to learn something about itself that it had spent over a century carefully avoiding.

The first thing people did, when they appeared on screen, was apologize.

They apologized for how they looked. For the state of the room behind them. For the pile of laundry just out of frame. They apologized in advance, a little nervously, for the child who might wander in, for the dog who might bark, for their mother who might appear in the doorway carrying a cup of tea. They apologized for their lives.

Background blur did not exist yet. It would not be introduced until late 2022, by which point the most intimate and revealing chapter of the pandemic was already behind us. In those first two years, there was no veil. The backstage door had swung open, and the audience was already seated.

What they saw, they loved. The interruptions went viral. Cats walked across keyboards and became celebrities. Children arrived in doorways with the magnificent confidence of people who have no idea that anything important is happening. A professor in the middle of a live BBC interview, now known simply as BBC Dad, found his four-year-old daughter walking into shot, followed by her baby brother rolling in on a walker, followed by his wife sliding across the floor on her knees trying to retrieve them. He was mortified. The clip gathered sixty-two million views. Three years later, when the pandemic forced the same man back in front of the same camera in the same home, and his children interrupted again, the BBC anchor stopped him before he could apologize. That is one thing, the anchor said, you can never apologize for now. It is part of the scene.

But where did the instinct to apologize come from in the first place? Why, in the year 2020, did a human being with a life feel the need to say sorry for evidence of that life?

The answer is not ancient. It is industrial.

For most of human history, a parent’s work was visible. It happened in and around the home, in the fields and the workshops and the kitchen, with children underfoot or strapped to the body or handing tools to a parent who was using them close by. The child did not need to wonder what their parent did. They were inside it. The apprenticeship was not a formal educational program. It was simply how knowledge moved, from body to body, in proximity, through doing.

Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, the factory whistle blew. And everything changed.

Work left the home. The father disappeared each morning to a building with a name on the door, among people the family did not know, doing things that could not easily be explained at dinner. The domestic space was sealed off and feminized, elevated into a moral sanctuary away from the rough rationality of industrial life. Work became serious, productive, public. Home became soft, emotional, private. And the ability to keep these two worlds cleanly separate, to leave home fully behind when you crossed the threshold into professional life, hardened, over the following century, into a signal of status and competence.

The sociologist Erving Goffman gave this architecture a name. He called the professional world the front stage, the space where one performs for an audience. And the home, the backstage, where the performance is prepared, where the mask is set aside, where the real person lives. For over a hundred years, professional culture had one governing rule: keep the backstage out of sight.

The apology on the Zoom call was not mere politeness. It was a centuries-old reflex, the sound of the backstage door swinging open in front of an audience that was not supposed to be there. And the delight that greeted it was something older still.

For the children watching, something more was happening.

Most children born in the last hundred and fifty years have grown up with a mythologized parent. The father or mother who left each morning moved through a world the child could not see, a world of consequence and purpose and adult seriousness. The occasional dinner-table story arrived already edited, already processed into narrative, stripped of the tedium and confusion that constitute most of any working day. The child had no access to the raw footage. Only the highlights reel. And highlights, over years, become legend. The psychologist Carl Jung described this figure, the public face we show the world, as the Persona: a mask built from social expectation, designed both to impress and to conceal.

There is a psychological term for what happens when that mask is all a child sees: the family myth. An imaginal narrative that can elevate the parent into something larger than they are in reality, competent, purposeful, unreachable. Some myths foster a child’s development. Others, by fostering the archetypal features of the parent’s role, deny the child the opportunity to see the parent as a human being.

When the pandemic moved work into the home, it did not just change where work happened. It changed what children could see. The legend was suddenly live. The archetype had a bad Wi-Fi connection.

One teenager, after a year of watching her father work for the European Space Agency from home, said: I knew my father was not an astronaut, but it still surprised me how little physics he used in his job. Space exploration, it turned out, looked a lot like sitting in a chair and talking to a screen. Another teenager, watching her mother manage projects from the kitchen table, said she definitely did not want a future sitting in front of a computer. I do not know how she does it, she said.

That is not disillusionment in the bitter sense. It is something more generous, the humanizing of a figure who had, through no fault of anyone’s, been mythologized by distance. The parent became, briefly and vividly, a person. Tired. Sometimes funny. Reaching for a cup of tea just as the call came back to them.

And the child watched. As children have always watched, when given the chance.

What the child was doing, in watching, is one of the oldest and most essential forms of human learning. Not listening to an explanation. Not reading an account. Watching a body do something in the world, and allowing their own body to begin to understand it. Researchers call this embodied cognition, the understanding that knowledge is not acquired in a vacuum, but is grounded in the sensory and motor contexts in which it occurs.

We have a philosophy of knowledge that has tried, for centuries, to separate the mind from the body. To locate real understanding in the realm of the abstract, in language, in reason, in the transfer of information from one mind to another. What the pandemic forced us to feel, at scale and in real time, is the cost of that separation.

What the body experiences, the mind knows differently than what it is simply told. A child learns what heavy means by lifting something heavy. A child learns what fragile means by holding something that breaks. The concept is not the word. The concept is the memory of the sensation.

What the screen could not carry was not information. Zoom was adequate for information. What it could not carry was the knowledge that lives below language, the kind that passes between bodies in proximity, that mirrors itself through the nervous system, that requires the presence of another person actually in the room. Research on how students learn in physical classrooms found that they mentally imitate the gestures of their teachers, that this bodily mirroring contributes to recall in ways that no screen can replicate. Mirroring another person’s behavior is not a nicety. It is at the core of what it means to be human.

The Zoom fatigue that settled over millions of people was not laziness. It was a neurological complaint. On a screen, the eye cannot perform the subtle, shifting gaze it uses in natural conversation, it stares, continuously and unnaturally, into the face of another person. The body receives none of the ambient sensory information that tells it where it is, who is near, whether it is safe. The brain works harder for less. We knew this, afterward, because researchers named it. But we knew it in our bodies first.

The ache was the data.

There is a method of education that has understood all of this for over a hundred years. It was developed not in a university but in a Roman asylum, by a physician who observed children who had been confined there and noticed that what they needed above everything else was more contact with their environment, with real things, real materials, real life. Her name was Dr. Maria Montessori. And what she built, from that observation, was not a theory waiting to be tested but a practice already underway, in thousands of classrooms around the world, on the morning the first lockdown was announced.

Montessori believed that children use their early experiences to build the very foundations of their minds, that these preverbal, sensorimotor impressions run deep, creating an implicit worldview that can linger and echo throughout a life. The environment, in her framework, is not a backdrop to development. It is the third teacher. The child absorbs the ideas embedded in the design of the space around her just as effortlessly as she absorbs language. She does not need to be told. She needs to be placed somewhere worthy of absorption. The Association Montessori Internationale, founded by Montessori herself in 1929, has carried this understanding for nearly a century.

This is why Montessori classrooms use natural materials, real wood, real glass, real metal. This is why the furniture is child-sized, the shelves accessible, the sink reachable by small hands. Every element sends a message to the body before it reaches the mind: you belong here, you can do this, this is real. And this is why, in a Montessori framework, a device is not neutral. Before reaching for a screen, the question is always: is this the best way, or the only way, to do this? If the hand, the eye, the body moving through real space could do it better, the device is set aside. Not out of ideology. Out of an understanding of what learning actually requires. The American Montessori Society has grounded this principle in over sixty years of teacher training and research.

What the pandemic ran, involuntarily and at enormous cost, was Montessori’s central argument as a global experiment. It placed children in front of screens and asked the screens to substitute for presence, for materials, for the environment as teacher. And it documented, in developmental regressions and emotional dysregulation and learning loss and loneliness, the precise cost of removing what Montessori had always said was non-negotiable.

Earlier this year, researchers published the results of the first nationwide randomized controlled trial of public Montessori education in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that children in Montessori programs entered kindergarten with stronger reading, stronger memory, and stronger executive function than their peers, and that these gains did not fade. They grew. The researchers, looking at a method more than a century old with a continuous record of demonstrating its value, reached for a particular phrase to describe what they had found.

They called it a powerful, affordable model hiding in plain sight.

Hiding in plain sight. For over a hundred years.

The pandemic did not teach us anything new about human beings. It reminded us of things we had arranged, very carefully and over a very long time, to forget. That learning lives in the body. That children need to see adults clearly, not mythologically. That the front stage and the backstage cannot be kept apart forever without cost to everyone on both sides of the door. That presence, physical, embodied, irreducible presence, is not a luxury or a preference. It is a condition.

We apologized for our humanity for a hundred and fifty years. For two strange, disorienting, clarifying years, the whole world stopped. The door swung open. The children wandered in. The dog barked. The tea arrived.

And what was hiding in plain sight, it turned out, was not a crisis at all.

It was us.

If you wish to follow the research and thinking that inform this work, the books Mapping Montessori Materials for AI Competency Development and Montessori & AI -Volume I are available through my website, katebroughton.com.