Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
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Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#2> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully.
I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully.
It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons.
For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary.
The solution is not to generally apply more careful and scientific thinking, because the problem is not a lack of careful and scientific thinking. The agencies in charge are full of people who study this exact problem for a living and are fully qualified and trained for it.
What we're really grappling with is a clear mismatch of priorities between the decision makers and the "decision-makees." Why didn't their study and training lead to a decision that we're all comfortable with? If someone is to blame for this poor decision, why have they not been indicted -- and if we, the public, are to blame for our complicity, why haven't yet we acknowledged our mistake?
No one wants to point the finger out of fear of being called divisive. But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..."
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#3I live in a city with 95% adult vaccination (at least one dose) and the government has just announced that they are exploring how to open schools at an indeterminate date in the future.
If we can’t just go back to normal now, then why don’t we just give up?
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#4This is crazy.
No. Lack of school doesn’t create harm. Attempting to shoehorn traditional schooling into an online form certainly can.
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#5I live in a city with 95% adult vaccination (at least one dose) and the government has just announced that they are exploring how to open schools at an indeterminate date in the future. If we can’t just go back to normal now, then why don’t we just give up?
Adults don't go to school.
It's not that much further to vaccinate kids though, we are almost there.
In the UK schools have been open, and the new variant is rampaging through, if we hit vaccine escape it will be because of actions like this.
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#6> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The sol…
> the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully
It's just getting harder and harder, as more and more is revealed, to believe that the costs and risks weren't weighed based on what harm or benefit would come to specific individuals instead of how specific policies would help or hurt specific politicians and political interests. Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk, but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk.
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#7I live in a city with 95% adult vaccination (at least one dose) and the government has just announced that they are exploring how to open schools at an indeterminate date in the future. If we can’t just go back to normal now, then why don’t we just give up?
I do feel for you.
I"m Canadian, Ontario specifically.
We've done well with vaccinations, though nowhere near close to 95% and we're still in the longest lock down world wide with no real signs of things going back to normal.
But there are signs that things are getting better. Its a long time betweeen now and September, let's give it time to see how things go. As long as the trend is moving in the right direction and governments give back their emergency powers( we have an Ontario government that just granted themselves a longer stay on their power even though we're doing really well in terms of vaccinations nd case counts) then maybe be patient and let things play out.
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#8> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The sol…
It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu.
If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fine, watch them yourselves."
Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#9> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The sol…
It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fin…
Honestly, I wonder if remote learning couldn't be better for at least some student populations. I have family who were bullied terribly (think on the level of "attacked by a crazy person with a knife at school" and "sexually harassed by teachers") and they probably would've benefited from an easier way of getting away from their tormentors instead of having to quit school and get a GED.
I know that's not a one-size-fits-all thing, people are social after all and isolation causes its own issues, but I sort of wonder if remote learning can't become an option for kids, especially those who are poorly-served by their local schools.
Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm
#10This is crazy. No. Lack of school doesn’t create harm. Attempting to shoehorn traditional schooling into an online form certainly can.
These aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s not like there was enough time to come up with something better.
Wealthier households with a well functioning family unit did well perhaps even better than normal, poorer ones and or ones that had family issues most likely resulted in a much poorer outcome than normal schooling.
How much did it actually impact children we won’t know for quite some time, it would all depend on how many of them will catch up and how the education system would adapt to the new gap(s).