Closing the world's schools caused children great harm • Hacker News Board

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#41

Post by 5bolts » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #25

This whole narrative is insane. I can't help but think there's an underlying objective to drive for additional funding to fix a problem that does not exist. Kids did not go from learning 100% to 0%. Let's make an argument that, perhaps (and I don't believe this either) they learned 50% of what they would have learned in person. Half. OK. How much harm does that cause? For reference, I have two kids who went remote th…

should attempt to start with a shop class / home economics being mandatory like Gym was when i was in highschool... Thankfully they were available to me - to many of my friend's kids don't even have the option these days as the shops and kitchen labs are closed due to costs... but they sure fund the shit out of sports.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#42

Post by acatnamedjoe » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #14

tboyd47 wrote: post #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 sol…

A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analy…

There is no such thing as dispassionate cost benefit analysis (or at least, there isn't outside of a very narrow range of specific cases).

Cost benefit analysis for big complex issues like coronavirus requires the identification and quantification of things that are really difficult to identify and quantify, and there's no easy way to do that without some form of subjective value judgement.

CBA done properly is a good way to make these judgements explicit and transparent. CBA done badly is a good way to hide those judgements behind a load of figures. Neither is dispassionate.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#43

Post by bluefirebrand » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

tboyd47 wrote: post #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 sol…

> 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..."

It's a good lesson that life is messy and unpredictable and society can only do so much to shield us from that.

If they cannot come to grips with the idea that a year of their education was sacrificed to try and save lives during a global pandemic, that's on them. Kids around the world and throughout history lose education for way worse reasons.

For instance, when I was growing up I lost at least a year to teacher strikes. My teachers went on strike for months at least once at every level of my education, Elementary, Secondary, and University (Yes, I was paying for it. I lost more than half a semester. No I wasn't refunded or credited for the next year or anything.)

I wish I could say I lost that time because we were trying to save lives, instead of "My teachers union was happy to use my education as a bargaining chip in trying to negotiate for a better collective agreement, and my school board would rather let me and everyone else go without than give the teachers union what they wanted"

At least "we were trying to slow a pandemic and save lives" sounds heroic.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#44

Post by bellyfullofbac » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #14

tboyd47 wrote: post #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 sol…

A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analy…

Ugh, Twitter mobs? Governments that got the pandemic "under control" gained approval ratings, the ones that messed up, well, that I agree with Biden aide that quipped "Covid is the best thing that ever happened to [Biden]". Had Dumbass & Co. got it under control, he would've probably won the reelection...

So I don't think it's just the Twitter mobs...

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#45

Post by CarelessExpert » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #37

CarelessExpert wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea? Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.

If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame. We closed the schools just fine but st…

> If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.”

Absolutely, it did!

But is that more harm than if their parents, siblings, grandparents, or friends got sick or died from covid?

In short: Does that harm outweigh, balance, or is it overwhelmed by the harm caused but not closing schools?

That's not an easy question.

That being said, while I disagree with how the article's initial positioning on this topic (that governments didn't weigh the harms), I 100% agree with the rest of the article and I hope governments use this as an opportunity to improve education by learning from these experiences.

> We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.

This is sounding suspiciously like a nirvana fallacy.

All solutions for managing COVID are imperfect, and the defenses are layered. I struggle to believe there is any scenario where school closures are not a useful tool in the COVID prevention toolkit.

Would it be nice if other measures were more effective and school closures could be used more sparingly?

Sure.

But we don't live in that world.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#46

Post by astalwick » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #35

astalwick wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was possible in other countries. My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave. Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the exten…

But staying home surely wouldn't help if the virus came home with Little Billy? And I'm guessing nobody wore masks and limited contact with their own children in their own homes...

If a child or a teacher at a school caught covid, the entire class was fully quarantined for a minimum of 14 days and two negative covid tests were necessary for anyone in that class to return. Classes were kept fully isolated from one another, and children had to wear masks in class for a significant part of the year.

No teacher at our school (~600 children) caught covid, and only 3 classes were closed.

What I'm getting at is: it was fully possible to open up schools, provided you have a government and a population that is willing to accept restrictions in other areas. _It's a choice to close schools and demand that indoor restaurant dining stay open_.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#47

Post by morsch » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

AndrewBissell wrote: post #18

stuaxo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once all the kids are vaccinated (and BTW even the WHO is taking a cautious approach on this given that it's unclear whether young children are at more risk from Covid or the shots), what's the plan for preventing variants from developing in the developed world? In animal reservoirs? In the large numbers of vaccinated people who still wind up hosting (usually minor and asymptomatic) infections? If vaccine escape happ…

From what I understand, there is a good chance that the pool for variants is limited, and that vaccinations (or a past infection) give decent immunity for new variants. Even for a variant with an immune escape, ie. you are not immune and might even spread it, your past exposures will make a serious case with hospitalisation unlikely. Immune escape is not a boolean attribute.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#48

Post by dukeofdoom » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

They're learning from playing with other kids. I've seen more parents go for walks and kids playing outside than ever before. They don't want to sit at home all day. So they socialize and play sports more now. Pickup Soccer, Biking, and so on. It's great for their mental health and development to be doing things on their own, figuring out the world, without parental supervision. You can learn so much from team sports.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#49

Post by MattGaiser » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16

jfengel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who is literally studying to be a teacher, I don't think teachers were being entirely reasonable throughout the pandemic. Particularly a little later on when we didn't have vaccines yet, but knew more about how the virus spread and were somewhat better at treating it. Yes, teachers didn't sign up for this. Neither did grocery store workers or—in many cases—even nurses and other hospital staff. Everyone did…

Lots of grocery store workers, nurses, and doctors sat the pandemic out too. Grocery stores needed to increase pay to keep people. Where I am, nurses were often in short supply. Anecdotally know a bunch of physicians who took the past year off.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#50

Post by jchallis » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

throwaway49274 wrote: post #11

My kid is They figured out PPE and distancing protocols about six weeks after initial shutdown and all kids were back in class. To our knowledge, there were no known covid outbreaks (all parents and staff are emailed when a staff or student is diagnosed). Capitalism wins again.

Hi Throwaway - sounds like Bright Horizons at Genentech? My 3 year old was at Bright Horizons at UCSF and they were even faster (~5 days) to figure out protocols to keep kids in the program so their essential worker parents could fight this war. Hard decisions were made and tradeoffs happened.