THIRTY years ago, no radical bookshelf was complete without a copy of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. It accused the education system of debasing the human spirit. Children needed to be set free from the chains of the classroom.

I don’t think this latter-day Rousseau really believed deschooling would actually happen. But in Scotland, thanks to Covid it could be within sight. School’s out, not just for summer but for the foreseeable future.

At least that was the educational prognosis from the Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, at the weekend. He announced a new “blended” learning, which sounds like something to do with tea, but is a euphemism for Scottish children spending most of the school week at home.

READ MORE: Opinion: Brian Beacom: Why I am edging slowly towards the pro-independence point of view

Parents in Edinburgh were told that, when schools go back on August 11, they’ll be lucky to see their children getting face-to-face teaching for a third of the time. Many Scottish pupils might only get one day a week. This is not so much blended as half-baked.

Mr Swinney also endorsed the view of Larry Flanagan, general-secretary of the teachers union the EIS, that next year’s exam diet should be cancelled, like this year’s. Few in the education establishment much like competitive exams at the best of time, so it might seem unsurprising that they have been dropped – for the first time since 1888.

But this is largely about practicalities. Pupils are supposed to get a minimum of 160 hours of teaching before they sit an exam, and under lockdown rules that just isn’t going to happen.

Parents, who don’t seem to have been consulted by Mr Swinney’s misnamed Education Recovery Group, are furious. They see this as an abdication of responsibility by bureaucrats who care nothing about educational attainment and are putting the interests of their own client groups above the welfare of children.

Parents in Edinburgh formed an instant pressure group, 50/50, to demand proper, face-to-face education at least 50 per cent of the week. Sarah Chisnall says they also want serious benchmarked online learning for the other part of the “blended” learning experience, with a regular amount of teacher face time.

Three months into school lockdown, it is surely a scandal that nothing of the like has been done. Home schooling is practically non-existent in many areas, according to parents, with some children having no contact with anything remotely resembling an actual teacher on line. Google, FIFA 2020 and Instagram are poor substitutes.

A UK-wide study from University College London confirmed yesterday that two million children across Britain have done little or no schoolwork at home during the lockdown. Four million have not had regular contact with a teacher and six million have not returned their most recent assignment.

Nicola Sturgeon, who recognises a political disaster when she sees one, leaped in to try to undo the damage done by her deputy. “It is absolutely not the case that we are planning on blended learning to last a year or anything like it”, she said on Monday, giving no guarantees that it won’t.

The First Minister promised that face-to face-teaching will happen “as soon as possible”. Exams will go ahead – well maybe – and she hinted that the two-metre rule in social distancing might be relaxed in schools.

“Delusional.” said the SNP’s sometime coalition partners, the Scottish Greens, which has a lot of teachers amongst its membership. Like Larry Flanagan of the EIS they think next year’s exams should be cancelled because there is no safe way of preparing children for them.

Tell that to the parents. We know that the risk to children is vanishingly small. To prevent pupils spreading the disease to teachers and parents, schools could use masks, hand sanitisers, “bubble” cohorts, and perspex screens.

It is not as if children aren’t associating already out of school. The extra transmission risk from a deep-cleaned environment like a school must surely be negligible. The risks of not going to school – mental health, obesity, domestic abuse and the like – are almost certainly greater than the risk of Covid.

READ MORE: Coronavirus: Push to prescribe vitamin D to people at highest risk from Covid in bid to curb 'second wave' of virus

Parents say, rightly, that the two metre rule is not enforced in hospitals. It manifestly isn’t in supermarkets, parks and public transport either. So why is this bureaucratic red line being applied in schools?

Why is the education of their children not a priority, they say? With classes and schools only able to handle a third of children, the obvious answer is to increase the number of classrooms and the number of teachers.

Break out of the school precincts and start deploying unused venues like cinemas and churches, even marquees. Bring in supply teachers and retired teachers to bump up the numbers.

It would of course mean more than the £300 million or so in additional funding the Government is currently offering the local authorities. But the Scottish education and skills budget is more than £3.5 billion. Surely some of that could be reallocated, as was the case in the NHS when they set up “pop-up hospitals” like the Louisa Jordan.

At any rate, Nicola Sturgeon now has a major fight on her hands. The EIS says, correctly, that the two-metre rule is still what the Government’s scientific advisers say is necessary to prevent a second wave of Covid-19. They are not going to shift on that, even if the World Health Organisation has been talking about reducing it to one metre.

There are two million parents out there and only 50,000 teachers. Ms Sturgeon can do her political arithmetic. She is going to have to spray some serious cash to get the schools back on any kind of functioning basis.

Scottish teachers got a 10 per cent pay hike from the Government last year. I suspect Mr Swinney is going to have to loosen the purse strings again to prevent the deschooling of a generation of Scottish children.

The late Ivan Illich, whose thinking influenced the Curriculum for Excellence, envisaged children teaching themselves, using technology, even though he was writing before the internet existed. He would be proud to see the nation’s youth gathering around their screens. Unfortunately, parents aren’t – especially if it means they lose their chances of educational qualifications.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.