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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Hmm I don't get it. They were a bit flippant, but they were just venting frustrations. Based on context, it seems they want to keep schools closed for safety reasons and got a lot of push back from parents.

Here's Paul Graham saying almost the same thing in 2003:

> And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

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> In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done.

I work from home full-time. Our seven year old son has a desk in the adjacent room with a laptop on it. He'd happily sit there using his laptop all day long instead of going to school, leaving me in peace to work in the office. So I don't feel like we really need school as a babysitter (although I acknowledge many other parents don't have my kind of job and so really do need school as a babysitter)

What I think we really need school for is to get him away from his laptop and into face-to-face interaction with other kids. Learning is quite secondary to that. (He's a smart kid and he learns a lot of stuff outside of the context of formal education.)

Based on the record in video game sales, I suspect that a lot of kids took the opportunity to improve certain skills during this period. I play a bit, and noticed that even old multiplayer games that used to be almost deserted are flooded with kids. I highly doubt that they are as eager to go back to school as their parents claim.

Paul Graham probably wouldn't last very long on a school board.

I agree, but I say that as an indictment on school boards, not on PG.

It takes a certain type of person to thrive in the school board environment, a political animal. Petty tyrants excel.

You don't see anything wrong with the statement by a school board member, when they are assembled for an official meeting, of " “B—-, ..If you call me out, I’m going to f—you up.”

That's odd. I think this is very wrong. You and I have different definitions of "flippant." This is a threat.

I think the spike in suicides and reports from students and parents that kids are not doing well without social interaction speaks for itself.

So too did the school board; they were saying things that simply should not be said by people in a position of power. Some of it certainly went well beyond merely flippant.

Last I heard, there were mixed results on the health implications to kids. Are there current reports during these spikes?

I guess that depends on whether you trust the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...

The section titled "COVID-19 in children and adolescents" has plenty of footnotes.

Honestly, at this point things are just annoying complicated. I do feel that most people pushing to open schools are doing so from a convenience angle. Having the kids at home has been really difficult. Worse, isolating them at home has been cruel.

But I have a hard time squaring fears of letting kids visit other families with kids, with this push to send them all back to school. :(

Thanks for the footnotes. I will be perusing those when I can.

> in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose

Parents who think about their kids in this way don’t deserve them and should not have them.

Why? Nobody is saying they don't like kids, but rather it's hard to focus on anything if you're constantly responsible for another human.

Obviously the implication is society needs to change. What's the point of industrialisation if you can't have a normal family experience?

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