If one thing has become clear in this crisis, it is that students are struggling with the pressure to graduate on time. “When you prioritise efficiency above all else, you end up with little leeway. So your buffer is smaller when unforeseen circumstances inevitably arise. That’s what this crisis has shown, including in education. As a student you should have the freedom to decide that your study programme isn’t right for you, without it immediately having huge repercussions. In this sense, the focus on efficiency has gone too far. With students confined to their rooms by the lockdown, unable to do internships or gain experience abroad, letting them extend their studies over a longer period has only become more important. You have to give them more time to experiment, time for personal and social development. An injection of government funding can certainly contribute to this. In the coming years, we’ll have to be more lenient, for example by making binding study advice more flexible. The high school students who are now forced to sit their final exams under difficult circumstances may not face a smooth transition. We—and the government—have to be alert to this.”

The crisis has advantages too

Throughout his career, Kooman has combined patient care, research and education. As director of EDLAB, he has witnessed the recent explosion in online education initiatives that, even when things return to ‘normal’, we can continue to benefit from. “In the ‘Edvance’ project, we’re identifying which online education initiatives have been successful: internationally, by means of a literature review, and internally, with our own teachers, programme coordinators and students. We hope to have the results by the end of this year. Blended learning, an integrated combination of off- and online education, is likely to take off even more. Online education works well when it comes to pure knowledge acquisition; I saw that myself as a tutor for first-year students. The transition went smoothly and I don’t think it’s been detrimental in terms of knowledge acquisition. But education is about more than merely acquiring knowledge: it’s also about socialisation and personal growth, which is more difficult to achieve solely online. The problem right now is that there’s no way for students to get together. They can’t go play sports, meet up with their study association, hang out together here. So it’s not just online education that leads to loneliness; it’s the social situation as a whole. In retrospect, I think we’ve learnt a lot as a society, but we’ve paid a big price for it. If we try to find the good in it, then at least it won’t have been in vain.”

Voting is a moral obligation

Kooman takes an empathetic view of the measures taken by the government. “There’s a lot of criticism of the cabinet, but it’s easy to judge after the fact. I assume that they acted with the best of intentions and to the best of their knowledge to all these new and unexpected developments. No doubt things could have been done better, but it’s just a terribly difficult situation. Working in healthcare myself, I understand why they prioritised what they did. Without the measures, we would most likely have been overrun.”

Kooman already knows who he will vote for, but where remains unclear. “I’m worried about that. Perhaps it’d be better to postpone the election until all the elderly and vulnerable people have been vaccinated. Now it’s likely there’ll be a low turnout because people won’t dare to vote for fear of infection, as we saw recently in Catalonia. That doesn’t serve democracy. I see voting as a moral obligation, but people also have to be able to vote safely.”