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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#111

Post by mithr »

It's amazing to me that this article presents the "hard choices" as mostly "should we trade off harming children against harming adults?", rather than "should we trade off not harming anyone against people's freedom to choose to go about their normal lives while unvaccinated?" and only mentions the unvaccinated offhandedly.

It's less that the US has chosen to prioritize adults over children and thus children are suffering, and more that the US has chosen to prioritize the freedom to be selfish and ignorant over both adults and children, and thus everyone is suffering. Make vaccination a requirement for (both foreign and) domestic flights. Make it a requirement for attending any public event. Make it a requirement for eating at any restaurant. Make it a requirement for parents who want to send their kids to school. Make a process whereby those relatively few adults who legitimately can't be vaccinated due to e.g. medical reasons have an exception (other countries have already done so). Make the willfully unvaccinated have to stay at home because society is closed to those who care more about making a point about "freedom" than about harming everyone else in it.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#112

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

runako wrote: post #23
babyblueblanket wrote: post #9

Are there any teachers who can really talk about solutions to the problems covid presents? Rather seriously, of what I can find anecdotally online (as I know no teachers IRL) that even trying to have in-person classes haven't really helped, because parents pull their kids out of class or a significant chunk misses school due to being out sick/quarantine and now the entire lesson plan is screwed up.

There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB. Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare. Schools have logistics problems due to students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick teachers to school, they would do that. In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents…

The person you’re responding to asked only about teachers though.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#113

Post by ajmurmann »

stathibus wrote: post #11
animal_spirits wrote: post #5

> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligat…

Human nature. Harm through inaction is more palatable than risky action.

This cannot be mentioned enough. It's such a weird bias. Just repeated again with the bizarre delay of the critical Pfizer medication that statement was unethical to not give to the control group but ok to delay approval for months.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#114

Post by WalterBright »

bsder wrote: post #49

Except that real solutions never seem to be on the table. For example, how about atomizing school into pods of smaller numbers of students with teachers scattered around the district instead of 30+ students per teacher with 1000+ students crammed into a building or campus? This would be especially effective for the youngest students. And a "Covid Outbreak" would shut down less than a dozen students and a teacher for…

The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times).

To make schools safe is simple - hold classes outside. It won't work everywhere everytime, but it can work enough. It'll work fine in California, Arizona, Seattle most of the time, etc.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#115

Post by nsxwolf »

wayoutthere wrote: post #52
animal_spirits wrote: post #5

> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligat…

The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying. We’ve treated teachers like shit for so long that many are just saying “nope, not dying for a job” because they can go make more money doing literally anything else. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel even before Covid. If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system ha…

This sentiment seems strange in 2022. Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#116

Post by zepto »

sg47 wrote: post #107

Gun violence in schools has increased so we should be sending children to school? There were school shootings before the pandemic and there are school shootings now. Nothing has been done to address either the mental health issues or access to guns.

What has this got to do with covid? Also, guns have been more easily available in the past than they are now.

Access to guns isn’t causing the uptick in school shootings. If we knew what was causing it, perhaps we could address the problem.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#117

Post by giraffe_lady »

runako wrote: post #23
babyblueblanket wrote: post #9

Are there any teachers who can really talk about solutions to the problems covid presents? Rather seriously, of what I can find anecdotally online (as I know no teachers IRL) that even trying to have in-person classes haven't really helped, because parents pull their kids out of class or a significant chunk misses school due to being out sick/quarantine and now the entire lesson plan is screwed up.

There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB. Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare. Schools have logistics problems due to students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick teachers to school, they would do that. In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents…

The parents don't create that pressure though. Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare. People don't have leave, paid or otherwise, to take care of their children at home, but they must go to work anyway.

This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#118

Post by wizzwizz4 »

xwdv wrote: post #78
tester756 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences How about learning from the Internet?

Doesn’t work very well with young children.

It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…).

If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every time you close them, other children… but apart from the first two, I see no problem with that).

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#119

Post by heavyset_go »

_jal wrote: post #54
superfrank wrote: post #18

I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…

There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…

> What I don't understand is why so many people seem to view it that way.

It's classic minimization. You see it all the time when someone is motivated to ignore reality, or is suffering from a condition that makes it hard to accept reality. A heroin addict might say that shooting heroin isn't a big deal because they haven't died from it yet, even if they have a history of overdosing.

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