No Way to Grow Up
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic.
The sooner you can come to terms with this, the better will be the outcome for your child. I recommend looking up resources on sharing childcare and teaching with other parents in addition to your kids' teachers.
The US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
The US also spends way more on healthcare and has worse outcomes. Those countries also have way different societies, taxation regimes, healthcare, attitudes towards vaccination, and social safety nets. It's hard to find a country that you can fairly compare the US to in all respects.
Pre-retirement: I don't take any personal responsibility for healthcare. It’s not an option. My employer provides me with a menu of more-or-less completely standardized options. Those options even specify how often I should go to general checks-ups and strictly police my access to specialists. I have very little power to control my own consumption of healthcare, aside from the things that almost all countries delegate to individuals: attending my regular check-ups and avoiding the obvious vices. At least in Germany I could get access to a specialist without first finding a doctor who is expert at interacting with automated processes at some actuarial firm. The biggest choice I can ever make is “do I take on a bit more risk so that I can stow away money pre-tax in an HSA”.
Post-retirement: Medicare.
> retirement
All Americans pay into SS and a huge portion of retirees do/will depend mostly on SS income to be able to retire.
Even without SS, one in five Americans have a pension. The rest (who can afford to save for retirement) probably have a 401(K) with a small menu of target date funds. There are some tricks you can play on the side, sure, but they’re marginal. The rest is post-tax savings; again, afforded to most individuals in most (all) western societies.
> employment
I’m not sure how this is different from places like Europe or even China/Russia.
In fact, the US is a bit of an outlier to the other extreme. As best I can tell, the US Department of Defense is undeniably the world’s largest social jobs program.
> Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run
It is sad that this is the case
All societies in all aspects are like this. Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation. Sure every once in a while there are bigger problems and the society has to come together. But by and large, we are all on our own.
Acknowledging this helps take control of their life, then do whatever is the best for them.
People need to be ok, with this concept of 'total ownership'.
Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school.
* Kids go to school to get emotional care.
* Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen.
* Kids go to school to learn social behavior.
* Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work.
* Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on.
In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.
In short, this concept that school actually has benefits is pretty alien to my lived reality.
This year (7-8yo), one sexually harassed her, school did shit, so she is homeschooling now.
I won't say more but many other things, including a crazy teacher humiliating kids as punishment (in a nutshell, asking the classmates to laugh at the kid), only listening to bullies etc.
If this is the so called socialization, fuck school. And we are in a supposedly a good town in Switzerland.
I can also tell you that in contemporary affluent european regions, my rosy version of the story is common.
It's of course an enlightment-style utopia, but even if reality often was and is different, I'm very convinced that this is what we should strive for.
There are different stances towards educating children, of course, but this one (and its versions) is arguably the humane one.
Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.
I was homeschooled, albeit not in the pandemic form and I got all of that from my parents. I can't even express how much more grateful your comment makes me that my mom sacrificed what she did to ensure I didn't have to get all of the above from school.
I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer.
A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions.
But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.
Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.
The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.
I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning
They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher.
Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year!
How is there not a national level library of resources they can draw on.
Khan academy is really great, why is Mr Briggs from my small town recreating it badly in power point every year.
As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?
It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.
I'm not a huge fan of cost-benefit decision processes but they are useful for removing some false dichotomies. Like "we can't afford to do the right thing" when the right thing is actually more cost effective.
I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays?
Stresses by the pandemic itself have likely caused parental productivity to plummet. Remember that "classrooms" are not the sterile abstractions you seem to bucket them into, they are staffed by teachers who are both employees and often parents themselves; with the accompanying stresses. They are required to face Covid, often from students who are imperfectly masked or unmasked.
I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.
As an American parent, COVID has been rough. I love spending my time with my kids, but there’s also an endless debate of “am I going to take time off work today to properly raise my children, plop them in front a screen when that’s the last thing their young brains need, or try and parent and work simultaneously while simultaneously failing at both?”
If you want to work full time, and your partner wants to work full time too, there’s lots of childcare solutions to supplement school during non-COVID times. Without those options, it’s just a continuous unstable compromise with work, partner, sending your kid to school vs online learning, etc.
—-
I can’t explain the pay thing with teachers vs doctors. I don’t understand how my wife, a healthcare provider, was able to deliver a baby at a private, well-equipped clinic in Kenya for a total cost of $300 USD while having to pay >$6000 USD out-of-pocket after insurance for an uncomplicated birth of her own a few years later in a US hospital. Just the way capital, normal supply and demand, mixed with lobbying has distorted things over time I guess.
I also don’t really understand why people send their kids to private school instead of just putting that same monetary support directly into the public school system. Anyway, these are totally separate issues from the cultural reliance on schools as childcare providers.
This is a societally productive outcome, because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. If we had 10x the number of engineers, wages would drop significantly. Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different. But also likely more societally beneficial due to lowering cost to provide software (which in a competitive market, will get passed down to consumers).
A big problem we have though is lack of education/direction given to college students so many of them aren't even really aware of wages of various fields and choose based on likability of the role rather than considering both likability and economics.
Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay. Given that teachers are primarily government paid, we could elect to simply pay them more to attract higher caliber talent. But most fields aren't government employed, so not feasible for other roles.
Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage. That should be fixed/regulated against... it's pretty much monopoly power of labor to be able to decide number of doctors. Monopoly power on either the corporate or labor sides pretty much always leads to worse societal outcomes.
But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly". You're free as a student to choose a career path that pays better. I'm hugely in favor of reducing barriers to role switching and doing away with the traditional 4 year college program. Could open up lots of doors for people.
Whole conversation around free college is starting from the wrong premise (that 4 year college should even be the baseline). College is largely just a signaling tool, and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free
Obviously a nursing home aid is a lot more “essential” than a FAANG engineer, but the latter is paid substantially more. It sounds flowery and noble to pay people based on how “important” their jobs are to society. But it’s simply no way to run an economy.
Because child care has long been part of the value proposition of public schools. It's amusing how "you shouldn't have had kids if one parent wasn't willing to stay at home full time" is now something that the far left and far right agree on.
I don't mind the best teachers being paid more but we have to be honest with our numbers first.
That's not how salaries work at all. Waste collection is extremely essential to society (without it, tens of millions would die of easily preventable diseases, and big cities would be unviable). Yet garbage collectors also earn around $40k.
Why the resentful reaction? Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!
I'm proposing that the cost benefit analysis would show that we should invest more in keeping schools safely open, and doing so will probably pay off immediately without even factoring in future harm or benefit to children. It's not wrong to factor in that future, but if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus. (It's still not easy to build a consensus, but that's because our civil society is running on automatic and we struggle at making even win-win decisions)
- yes, teachers are severely underpaid and it makes little sense to me. Education is so important if not the most important matter for democracy but US messed it up so bad. I wish all teachers’ wages to double if not more.
Essentialism is what's needed here.
Nope. That just means it's a moonshot. Besides I don't agree with current education approaches, so why pedestal one over the other.
Also, there ARE metrics of subjective wellbeing and we can use them. There's a culture of denial and aversion to real challenges that leads to people to escape it through numbers and dollars. What you're saying sounds like what that culture says.
By making it about COVID, the affluent readers of the New York Times can pat themselves on the back as if they weren't failing the youth prior to quarantine measures. Of course they were.
I've seen it. Everyone's seen it; even if they've chosen to believe they haven't. The secondary sources have to water it down like this article if they want to talk about it at all. And the primary sources where it's laid bare are a bit too dirty and undomesticated to mention in polite society. Not as if anyone wants to be caught cavorting with primaries at all these days, lest the blue checks turn their back on it (and you, by association).
What if there was 40 USI just sitting on the shelf waiting to be picked up? But it's in a blind spot. It was there waiting in 2018 and never touched.
The 4 USI can be achieved by getting rid of the things we never wanted in the first place. Achieving that 40 USI will mean ruthlessly tearing into the status quo.
So, let's circle back and remind ourselves that this is an article using big words and statistics to state the obvious: schooling under covid sucks. No shit, that's not news, but it's in The Times. So let's look more carefully at what it does say. They're not learning enough, and the institutional socialization is producing people less well-adjusted than ever.
OK, technically true. But those were the most visible problems with schools before COVID too.
So, why is this specific article - written this way - in The Times? What purpose(es) - deliberate or not - does it serve?
I live in a state that has had a fairly restrictive approach to COVID - my kids were in remote learning for about a year and we had two periods which could arguably be called "shut downs." But our fortunate circumstances made it so that I do not feel like it was particularly difficult for our children. As a result I have not reacted very strongly to local authorities continuing very cautious policies regarding masks and cohorting in schools. I was initially perplexed by the very strong reactions against the same among my peers, but am coming to understand that, like what this article points out, it has been very difficult for other children.
This has been my experience too among families I know. If anything it has been more difficult on parents than it has been on children. That may be another source of reaction towards school polices.
Sweden was an outlier in keeping schools open, premised upon the rationale that social and mental wellbeing outweighed the risk covid posed to students[0].
I relocated from NYC to Stockholm early in the pandemic which gave me some interesting insights on comparative covid responses.
[0] https://www.gu.se/en/news/only-in-sweden-primary-school-rema...
Hell, Anything? No. Nothing is ever done. Nothing ever happens except decay.
The United States is spinning down its governmental duties. The pendulum will swing right again, and that will be the death blow. They will continue to gut public and infrastructure programs. All 3 branches will finally truly be a jobs program for the upper class to suck the blood out of everyone else.
The roads will fall apart. Jails will continue to fill up. The homeless crisis will continue to not fix itself. Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs, and then obligingly die when they can't afford the "good" insurance.
I mean San Francisco has a $1.1B budget for homelessness. That's a contribution of almost $1,300 for every man, woman and child resident of SF. And yet the problem is worse, not better.
Maybe it's not a money problem but the approach that's the issue.
They do not. I agree they are useless on purpose. That is my point.
If you are a property owner, then distributing the externalities and barbaric social harm of the insane NIMBYism and zoning laws that artificially protect your property's valuation to the majority renting population makes sense. A few thousand a year is nothing compared to real estate.
And obviously, that amount of money is easily enough to just give the unhoused the housing they need, if it weren't impossible to build affordable housing in the first place.
In fy2021-2022 the amount is $670M … over two years.
SF spends 1/4 of the amount you accuse it of.
Furthermore, it’s well known that other counties near and far send their homeless people here. So as a SF tax payer… I think you owe me many thanks for taking care of your homeless people.
Actually, a pediatric emergency was just declared [0]. And both Republicans and Democrats passed a $250 Million bill to provide rapid support for children's mental health. A Dr friend described it as "if I'm seeing a child and I'm concerned he/she is suffering from depression, I can be on the phone with one of the top 5 experts in the country in 30 minutes".
I'm aware, "mental health" for kids isn't the same as "education for kids" - but this is a big step in the right direction
[0]https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/zLatest_News/Pediatricians_CAPs_...
That seems like a less than scalable approach.
Sounds unreasonably optimistic.
About $2 per person under age 18.
What do you suggest? More funding? The US has one of the most expensive public education systems per capita. We keep pouring more money into it and it keeps getting worse. I'm in favor of "providing additional support to schools" but it needs to be something other than throwing money at the problem.
What is an event or piece of legislation that has been passed?
Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects, but it has been at levels typically only those further on the left would propose.
Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.
> Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs
These two points confict. Maybe the left should stop trying to raise the SALT tax deductions that the right reduced?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/22/democr...
And I say this as someone that would benefit from raising the SALT taxes. It is wrong for them to try to raise it
I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.
Unlikely. The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance. Even unstructured homeschoolers, who have little to no explicit instruction of any kind, are only on average a grade level behind average children[1]. The last historically comparable school closures, for the 1918 flu pandemic, had no detectable long run effects[2].
[1] The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students
http://zoleerjemeer.nl/files/1313/9109/4391/The_Impact_of_Sc...
[2]School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic https://www.nber.org/papers/w28246
Is this really true if the entire class missed a few years? It is very different having one kid who missed a lot and then later interacts with kids who all didn't miss a lot, and a class where every kid is behind a couple of years.
> Our results are not inconsistent with an emerging literature that finds negative short-run effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning. The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality.
Furthermore, from the paper:
> Another important contrast is that school closures in the 1918-19 pandemic were substantially shorter than current COVID-19 related school closures, potentially limiting their effects. In our sample of 1918-19 school closures, the average closure length was 36 days, and some cities decided to make up for missing school days by extending the school year.
Closing schools is just one of the many measures society has taken to steal the prime years of life from the young to give to the elderly.
I wasn't a day behind. The class had not advanced at all.
But I'm sure the pandemic will be blamed for school unachievement for decades. It's a godsend to the school industrial complex.
If I were of college age and was able, I'd take a gap year or two without any hesitation.
I wouldn’t bother and have seen the effects on people who did skip the last year or two. It’s been terrible for them. They’ve basically been stuck at home doing jack shit and watching years of their life disappear without any progress on literally any front.
I think it is more of a relative problem than an absolute problem.
Finally I didn't have to waste time on commute and it was way easier to ignore doubtful profs/useless courses and focus on the right things.
but yea, things may be harder if you don't know people you're studying with
Children are resilient. What is _hurting_ them is not the school closures, but the panic and uncertainty that some people have put around this.
Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be paid more? What about later start times for high schools?
There's so many things that can be questioned.
I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they connect. Covid is keeping our schools from even being schools. It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids are removed from the classroom, and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! If anything this indicates we don't need to reinvent our schools, we just need to reinvent our school HVAC.
(We also aren't reinventing school HVAC, which is disappointing because of all the options in front of us that's about the easiest.)
I'm not sure that was ever in doubt, but it doesn't mean classrooms are good environments for learning. "It's better than (almost) nothing" is where we're at now.
I have seen nearly every aspect of life in the U.S. take a major hit. Nearly no one cares about anything, and the attitude of taking care of me myself and I seems rampant.
I have been worried about children since day one, from social disorders to education. We have several generations that basically missed out on two years of schooling from pre-school through university levels. That can't be good in one to three decades time, even if we i prove the issues tomorrow.
Based on the news being fed to me, it’s almost as if the pandemic didn’t even happen to them.
The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and carry some emotional baggage forward.
The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less if helping them requires more taxes.
The type of conservatives that wield the most power in the US Senate are skeptical of public education. This is their golden chance to finally dismantle it, creating a patchwork of federally funded religious private schools.
At the same time, children will increasingly grow to be emotionally underdeveloped, leading to poor romantic relationships filled with toxicity, leaving them perpetually unsatisfied with life and cynical of others. Poor quality breeding will become rampant and add to the problem.
Over the past ~150 years, our society has been remade; higher education is hardly the esoteric province of the aristocracy and clergy it was ~700 years ago in Europe, and as you imagine it will "obviously" soon again be.
There's no doubt the elite retain advantages of birth. Perfect meritocracy seems at odds with humans' intuitive creation of entrenched hierarchy and autonomic drive to empower and extend one's specific genetic legacy. But even when beset by imperfection, corruption, hypocrisy, etc, a Western non-elite human's life is not likely to turn out "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as is it would have in almost any other age. A peasant in Lancashire c. 1350 could reasonably bet many of his children would die, and those that did not would live almost entirely the same life as his own. A working-class American can make the opposite bets just as reasonably.
All this to say: I'm no Whig historian, but it is impossible to deny tangible and massive improvements in the average human's access to education and general quality of life over the past several generations. It is therefore absurd to make "obvious" predictions such as you have, contrary to a pervasive, macro trend, without providing some insightful analysis. (William Gibson's Cassandra cries should not be used as primary evidence...)
We rich, lucky ones, likely as not great-grandchildren of semi-literate factory peons, seem, generally, to exist in a cynical milieu which thoughtlessly assumes inevitable dystopia (an anti-Whig history!). But recent negative trends in, for instance, the Gini co-efficient, are minuscule vibrations within a relentlessly positive curve [https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality].
How about learning from the Internet?
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 difference in the risk of death from covid-19 in households with or without children.
There's a big difference between, "You're just as likely to die from COVID if you have children" and "Children going to school doesn't increase the spread of COVID". The study even points out that closing schools "may decrease transmission", but the article completely ignores that.
This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms
Some districts simply weren't able to do virtual learning, and almost every parent their was an essential worker. They did a ton of outreach over the summer distributing Chromebooks getting people internet access etc but it still had a dismal turnout and had to go to modified in person in fall of 2020 for a couple weeks and then just full time regular school after a month or so. Even then they had a record number of non-returning students, and we are talking elementary school, first and 3rd grade. They can't find these kids, the official line is that they left the district, but there's no reason so many low income families would move in a single year.
They did masks, plexiglass, spacing and all the other stuff to start with, but it made instruction nearly impossible and they had so many problems with students bringing contraband including guns to school that they basically removed anything COVID related and had to ban book bags and made lunch free for everyone and no outside food without written persmission for allergies. They sent letters pleading for parents to please remind children not to bring guns or drugs to school. Delta 8 gummies have been a major problem. Again this is a school of about 1200 students that only goes to 3rd grade.
I think those on the outside of low income communities are really under estimating how a certain segment of the population is being drastically negatively impacted. Despite my families commitment to public education by nieces were sent to private school. There are still issues in their public schools and if you go to Walmart or just ride around their are school age children everywhere all day long even though full time in person instruction has been going on since Fall of 2020.
Like I'm not even sure how some communities will recover. This is an area that already had around 70% graduation rate now the pace of instruction is significantly reduced and 2nd grade is basically a repeat of 1st grade.
This writer may not have children, im terrified to leave my toddler behind, am I selfish? What is this fake dichotomy...
Of course, there’s the huge asterisk. This is all because most of those children had at least one parent who could and did actively take part in the virtual learning. Very lucky.
What it tells me though, is that the issue of virtual learning is not one of pedagogy or whatever, but simply one of money. It’s expensive to keep one person at home to teach kids on an ad-hoc basis.
We don’t want to really invest in education, so the other unavoidable choice is to “let er rip” through schools.
> International modelling studies which estimate that school closures have a meaningful effect on reducing transmission rates are all confounded by the near simultaneous introduction of multiple interventions (including lockdowns, curfews, closures of bars and restaurants). Moreover, they do not account for indirect effects of school closures which prevent parents from working outside the home. A systematic review of observational studies showed that in those studies with lowest risk of bias, school closures had no discernible effect on SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
The title of the cited article is "Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children", which I think gives a pretty clear picture of the researcher's conclusion. And that in turn matches what the New York Times wrote: "Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances."
I strongly agree with your second point... I'm all for a longer exploratory phase of life before people settle on a career, but that seems like it should involve a more gradual adoption of adult responsibilities, not delaying them ever more.
"[A]ccumulating evidence shows that teachers and school staff are not at higher risk of hospital admission or death from covid-19 compared with other workers" quote seems most pertinent. Other quotes that certainly back the paraphrase include "teacher absence decreased in tier 3 regions during the November lockdown despite schools remaining open" and "Teacher absence because of confirmed covid-19 in England was similar in primary and secondary schools in the autumn term."
Finally, the "Transmission" section explicitly casts doubt on studies that did show a reduction in transmission. Overall, "skeptical," as the linked NYT article states, seems dead on.
Were there other sources from the article that you took issue with?
The one I quoted above is the most obvious, but the other two things I take issue with are:
1. They seem to attribute the rising gun violence to covid, but when you look at the data they provided on school shootings, it's been rising since 2015. The number we're at now just looks like a continuation of that trend.
2. The fact about a third of their sources are just other NYT articles written by their colleagues. Chasing down the true source behind some of their claims is near impossible since it's often multiple levels of people interpreting the data.
IMO it's just as good an argument that children and their activities don't affect adults and covid mortality, so by extension opening schools shouldn't be a problem.
Sure, closing schools may "slow the spread", but what does that matter among a population that is ultimately very safe from the effects of covid?
>They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.
With a title like this, I think they are understating what the source claims.
Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n521
> They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.
And thought, "Right, yeah, it's the NYT." They're not fake news like Breitbart, but I seem to catch them 'pushing the envelope' on the truth a lot. And I like/agree with a fair amount of what they publish.
Is there? Because I fail to see it.
If "You're just as likely to die from COVID if you have children" (most of which, that is ages 5-to-17, go to school), then "children going to school doesn't increase the spread of COVID".
What would the alternative be? That children going to school does increase the spread of covid, but for some mysterious reason their own families are spared disproportionally from being infected by them?
If
(a) parents and non-parents would have mostly equal chances of dying if they contact covid.
(b) children going to school increased the spread of covid
one would expect their own families they co-live with, to be mostly affected by this.
Else what explains (b)? It's their teachers that increase the spread - and children going to school are not the carriers of these increased spread?
I'll admit I'm much less likely to follow links when my confirmation bias is kicking up into high gear but I've been trying to force myself to do it more after I received an article from a parent that I knew was full of BS and after following the links (the ones that weren't dead) I found the studies linked actually refuted the position the original article took. For way too much of my life I took "Blue text with underline" (or whatever color the style it to) meant "fact"/"cited"/"backed up", that couldn't be further from the truth.
I encourage everyone to follow links even if you are "sure" the article is 100% true, it can be very eye opening. At the very least you will get a better understanding.
You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed.
If politics is one-dimensional, that suggests that there is only one (main) political issue. History suggests that there's more to politics than one main issue, so what were you trying to convey by saying this?
In this case I think they’re right; omicron is a super spreading variant that is less lethal and impossible to control. Their audience is sick of lockdowns and employers are tightening the screws.
Well, there's no federal solution, so we gotta do something different, right?
The study that they're citing (https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628.short) tests whether living with children increases chances of death from COVID (it doesn't).
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 many people seem to view it that way.
233% increase in chance of death for people less than 65...
183% increase for people 65+: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shu...
i.e. there is a one-way ratchet on these measures since one direction is gated by the "trade grandma for a dollar" line.
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.
Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID" symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876
Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...
I'm seeing the opposite. Most public officials and news articles seem to only care about case numbers, which have very little meaning these days.
For instance, more positive tests could be due to testing. Hospitalizations are affected by different policies. I don't even know how you would measure long covid.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3063394/
But many cases of "long COVID" appear to be psychosomatic.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
And none of that is really relevant to school closure policy anyway. All of us will eventually get infected. At most closing schools again would only delay the inevitable. Instead we should focus on reducing risk factors by encouraging more people to get vaccinated and aggressively treating chronic metabolic diseases.
What I don't understand is why you would shut down schools and enforce silly unhelpful mask mandates on them when the science shows children do not spread the disease in any meaningful way and are not badly affected by it. This is the "blind" spot I see.
There are a lot of vested interests that bias toward opening schools.
Honestly I do not think we are capable of weighing particulars to make a scientific determination. We need policies around school closure that are rigidly followed in the course of a pandemic.
This is just false. The largest teacher unions in the country have been pushing school closures. This means many teachers, administrators and politicians also want school closures.
Until like the last week politicians have been reluctant to even suggest schools reopen
https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-teachers-unions-odds-over-20482...
Even the qualifiers of long covid and life altering conditions seems a heavy bar to set. A new rapidly spreading severe flu with low death risk is damaging enough to families and economies to take broad action.
With schools, there has been a strange preoccupation on only the health of the child. For many (like me), the risk is to the child’s parents and family where it is a major vector. I’d say 95%+ of my risk comes from the school risk. Maybe there are not enough of us to show in stats? But the logic is sound. The lack of any improvement in school ventilation in my country has been so terribly disappointing.
Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply attributed to keeping them at home, and when school reopens they will magically get back to normal. They have been exposed to non-stop disruption, illness, death and uncertainty for two years now.
Whether the covid pandemic goes away or not, a mental health one is upon us soon.
From the earthquake, or from the disruption?
It's an important distinction in the COVID case. Are kids being traumatized by having to attend school via Zoom, or are they being traumatized by living through a global pandemic?
Put another way: if an earthquake happens, but nobody notices except the Richter scale, does it impact anyone? Of course it's not the pandemic term itself, it's the first-, second-, third-order effects of covid and the term pandemic. Zoom school, masks, vaccines, media coverage, political shifts, fights, worrying about family members getting sick (possibly dying), seeing your friends less, fewer/smaller gatherings, longer periods of isolation, etc.
In my grandparents' generation, it was normal for a family to lose a third of their children before adulthood.
The US has had devastating epidemics before, like the 1918 flu, and the polio epidemics.
I don't think "normal" and "human race died out" are the only options. Your grandparents' generation may not have ever had or gotten back to what we'd consider normal today.
We always hope to make the world a little better for our kids than it was for generations before. Our kids will grow into adults, and they'll find their normal. But how different will that be from a world in which there was no pandemic? I don't know the answer.
These situations have been very common throughout history, and are still prevalent in many developing nations, and yet somehow those countries generally have better mental health, at least by metrics of depression and anxiety.
Man, it sucks that kids have to deal with this pandemic. But my grandparents had to deal with a whole lot worse than Zoom. The kids will be alright.
People see their kids suffering. Masks do have a cost. Millions of years of evolution say that facial expressions are really important, especially for adolescents. Fear has a cost. And quality of life matters.
Everyone knows this. Even the most pro-lockdown politicians are seen enjoying ordinary life among people. The ones who can't escape are the kids, because the adults tell them what to do 24/7 and punish them instantly when out of compliance.
It doesn't help that we label people who happen to see the real costs to children as some kind of science deniers. You don't have to deny science to realize that other things also matter.
[Edited for clarity.]
To me it feels like the numbers are focused on one metric: deaths from covid (per capita).
It seems obvious that that is what we should be focusing on. But I think most humans accept some risk of death in everyday choices. For example, driving to meet your friends to have dinner or "watch the game" or whatever brings some risk of death that "staying home alone" wouldn't.
For two years now, people have been in various states of behavioral modification to avoid "deaths from covid". During that time, children have suffered reduced learning; businesses have died or been killed; single people have gotten increasingly depressed; the country has increased anxiety. None of those things show up in "deaths from covid".
I don't know what the right answer is. But I do think that I personally am ready to "get back to normal" as much as possible.
I don’t think you’re a science denier, I don’t see in real life what you seem to take as fact.
In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents are demanding that schools be open. This accomplishes the daycare aspect of school, but to pretend it's about enhancing learning is fanciful.
This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.
1. Beginning of last school year: entirely remote. (Except for some children of essential workers; they were in a computer lab-like setting. In many cases they were in their regular school's classrooms, but not the same ones as their teachers, and the other kids in the room would be in different Zoom classes.) This was awful for the standpoint of learning or child care. Adults can barely stand Zoom for that long. I did my best to help my son keep focused, but it didn't work that well, and it came at the expense of my focus on my own work. I have a friend who just pulled her kids from public school for this time and went full-on home-schooling. She said the whole family's mental health and the educational experience greatly improved.
2. End of last school year: most kids in the classroom most days, a few unlucky ones still fully remote due to classroom size limits not actually recommended by the CDC, everyone on Zoom. The classroom is basically a computer lab, but now at least everyone in the room is doing the same thing. Obviously this was better for (most of) the parents, and a little better socially for (most of) the kids, but I think still pretty lousy for learning. The experience wasn't as engaging for the kids as it'd normally be, and the teacher has lost the parents who to varying extents helped keep the kids focused in phase #1.
3. This school year: kids in the classroom, wearing masks, getting weekly pooled COVID tests. If the pool tests positive, everyone gets tested individually and (for 10 days) goes into a "modified quarantine". Under those rules, kids who haven't individually tested positive can be in the classroom with the kids who have already been exposed to the same thing, but no after-school programs or extracurriculars or the like.
I of course hated phase #1 and #2, and I think they far outlasted any reasonable belief they were worthwhile. Phase #3 seems like a more reasonable compromise. I'm sure learning would be better if everything were normal, but this isn't as obviously harmful as phases #1 and #2 were. My son is definitely learning things at school. I don't know how much compared to a normal year. I too would love to hear a frank teacher's perspective on this.
I live in an area where the case rates have been relatively low, which obviously helps. Less disruption due to sickness/quarantine.
I wouldn't mind moving on to phase #4 where school-aged kids must have the COVID vaccine (along with the many other vaccines that are already required) and school goes back to normal. Schools should be fully open before restaurants and bars and the like.
My daughter's pre-K and too young for the vaccine but that's another story.
A lot of the student and teachers being kept home are symptom free.
This article is about the other kids. The kindergartners who haven't seen a teacher's face in 24 months. The grade schoolers forced to eat outside in the cold. The high schoolers who unofficially "dropped out" when their schools closed and will never return to receive their diploma. Those kids have suffered greatly in the name of reducing risk to adults.
In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no pressure from their day job.
In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the teacher is setting the day's agenda via a zoom call or two, and the kids have to follow the exercises after. Some of these exercises may not make sense to the parents.
The parents don't get any advance "teachers notes" or inkling of what is coming, the exercises appear and if the kid is stuck you need to figure out how to help them.
In summary pandemic remote schooling is not home schooling for 2 reasons. One is the parents probably have their main job to do. Two is the parents are not teaching, they are at best a teachers assistant who is badly prepped.
Homeschooling by choice has a great academic record with students doing well on standardized exams and in college. Kids who were sent home for “virtual school” on the other hand have a lot of learning loss on average.
Especially when parents still had to work and just put their kid in front of a TV, that’s not home schooling.
I have two kids just out of college, and they already have the attitude that they're defeated, the world is out to get them, if everyone older would just die, why can't we buy a new car for $4000 or a house for $20K?
> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.
There is already precedent for other acute respiratory infections (Scarlet Fever, influenza) causing cardiac damage that persists for decades. I don't understand how so many people are willing to make conclusions about long-term complications from pediatric Covid in the absence of long-term studies.
I also don't understand how one could write about tradeoffs for children without mentioning the growing ranks of Covid orphans, some of whom will be adrift in our anemic social services system for the coming decades. Besides that, losing a parent is one of the most traumatic events a child can experience. Discounting to zero that trauma given the scale of death in American is not doing the reader a service.
I'm in the Bay Area and it'll be coming up on 2 years soon of what basically amounts to a social shut down.
-- Many social groups are just not getting together anymore, including most of mine.
-- Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded bars/clubs just seem off the table at this point.
-- Masks for the majority of it, which makes gym going and working out, especially cardio, uncomfortable enough to not bother.
-- It's been so long that I've now never met, in person, anyone on my team at work.
Like yeah, technically we're not shut down. Technically you can do most things with masks/vaxxes. But for a lot of us things are still essentially shut down. Especially the social aspects.
At what point can we give up? If at 4 years in with Variant #3242, are we still going to be doing what we're doing now? There's zero sign that this thing is going to stop any time soon.
All of these things have been happening and filled to capacity since June. It's time to go outside and not rely on your coworkers for social interaction.
Here in Chicago all of these things have been on the table since early summer, albeit masked. Omicron has shut things down again to an extent, but I doubt that'll last through January.
Why not move out of the Bay Area?
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 a week or two and be done with it.
But, you see, that would take money. And everybody likes to bitch about education but nobody wants to spend actual cash.
And, by the way, if you think its been bad on kids, the teachers have had it bad, too. Unlike the kids, the teachers had a much higher probability of dying. And they get the joy of being on the frontlines with the anti-vax idiots. Any teachers I know of who can exit have been running for the doors.
Similarly the US spends the 4th most per capita, and about 1/3 more than the average of OECD countries.
I don't think money alone will fix this problem, judging by the number of quality teachers I know that leave for lower paying positions at private schools...
Plenty of people (including some in these comments) want to wax poetic about "think of the children" or "the children are our future" but I have a hard time those same people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Why we aren't shoveling money into education (before the pandemic as well) is completely beyond me and that's coming from someone who is childless. I'm more than happy to see my taxes go up if the money is going towards education.
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.
Educational television (which taught letters and phonics) and parents reading to me is what taught me to read. (Then I got a library card and checked out tons of books.)
I also learned basic arithmetic from television. (And simple algebra from teaching myself computer programming - which is probably backwards.)
Perhaps the remote instruction and home learning methods we adopted during the pandemic were not the right ones to emphasize.
The overall tone and style of this article is just... I don't know.
As a parent of elementary school children, I spent 2020 and 2021 seeing this stuff first-hand. Having arguments with other (non-parent) liberal friends on social media. Once they discovered that I was out of step on this one item of the current moment's orthodoxy, suddenly I was "voted off the island" altogether.
It was surreal. People who I thought were personal friends, a lot of their minds just flipped like a switch, and suddenly I was immediately and completely shifted over into the "right-winger" mental bucket. It wasn't just the "you think of school as free daycare" ignorant assumptions. I had friends assume that my views had changed on abortion, climate change, etc.
I still can't wrap my head around some of those conversations. I have completely abandoned social media, cut myself off from the vast majority of what I thought was my social support system, and discarded any delusions about political or cultural identity fundamentally having any bearing on human nature.
The New York Times was ONE OF THE PRIMARY DRIVERS of my social cohort's orthodoxy, to which I had become a heretic and outcast. To go through all of that, and then read an article from the same New York Times, echoing the same heresy? FUCK YOU. It's just too much.
I've noticed over the past few weeks that this article's main thrust is taking shape and being established all over the place as the new orthodoxy of the current moment. All of these harms were seen and known even at the time, a year and a half ago (my children aren't seeing a therapist for nothing), and were downplayed or dismissed outright. It seems unfathomable that the narrative has flipped around 180-degree so abruptly. I believe that the focus on harms seen in minority children is the loophole, or "new information", that seems to give people mental "permission" to change their viewpoint now.
The brutal truth is that in Year 3, even most progressives are reaching the point of being "over" the pandemic. So they are able to open their eyes and minds a bit. I don't know whether that enough for people to revisit the attitudes and assumptions that they were making back at the time. I don't know whether I even want to reconcile with most of those old friends even if they do. But it makes me sick to my stomach watching the NYT shift and slither from one zeitgeist to the next.
i'm so glad more and more people are coming to this realization. the nytimes is an awful news source, npr as well, for their unadulterated power bias: they want, and want to support, (democrat) power, and will run with any democrat narrative that meets that objective. it simply doesn't matter if the narrative has factual basis, or if a 180° reversal is required, as repetition will be used to ingrain it in sympathetic minds to be broadcast into enclaves and social groups all over.
it literally feels like 1984's "ministry of truth" being actualized. we need more independent thinkers cutting through this bullshit.
I feel your pain about the political binary we've developed though. I hold varying positions on a number of issues and would have formerly been called an 'independent' but now I'm just on the opposite side of anyone I talk to
That's almost an improvement! Usually we accept more harm to children in exchange for less mild annoyance to adults.
I imagine our response to climate change will be the same. Either we won’t do anything, or we’ll do enough to hurt ourselves, but not enough to solve the problem.
This is probably the consequence of our half-assed faux democracy. Power is neither concentrated enough to have an autocrat make decisions, nor distributed enough for crowd-wisdom to take direct action.
Finally someone said it. This is where "follow the science" doesn't make any sense. Science can't and decide what is really important in life. Do we give nurses less work and grandma a few more years or we harm our children?
We knew. We knew in March. We knew _straight away_, we knew that supply chains would fail, all sorts of cascading failures would happen, prices would rise, there would be all manner of mental health effects, people quitting their jobs, etc
We bloody knew. And we still know. And we've been screaming it.
But the opinion in "educated" circles is that lockdowns and restrictions are worth it no matter the cost because life has infinite value.
Even here, on Hacker News, people used to dealing in the trillions will look at e.g. coronavirus deaths in the UK and act as if they're enormous when they're just not. In 2 years (150k) coronavirus has claimed about as much as pneumonia/flu would in 5 (30k a year).
But well, yeah. My career has still disappeared, we're still intentionally depriving children of their development, we're still intentionally causing labour shortages.
And people wonder why no-one gives a toss about society any more. Because at scale you're bloody lunatics, that's why.
- school is 90% daycare
- 30min of real learning at the level of the child is more than a day at a regular school
- Give your kids real challenges with motivating reward and get out of the way
- What they miss most is connection with kids at the same level (That one is hard to fix)
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 obligation to give them their very important education.
If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system has been broken for a long time already.
Great, so just set up a fund to compensate teachers and daycare workers who get long covid in order to pay their salary and medical expenses for the rest of their lives if they're unable to work.
Bringing back pensions and providing free post-retirement healthcare for teachers and their families will back up grandiose statements like yours with actions. With the current right-wing thinking in vogue in the US, I suspect there is vanishingly little chance of that happening.
Access to guns isn’t causing the uptick in school shootings. If we knew what was causing it, perhaps we could address the problem.
To argue that we shouldn't have closed schools, or should have made things more normal for the kids is to say that our half-assed mealy-mouthed nothing of a response to the pandemic didn't work, so we should have done even less, tried to spread the virus even harder, and that would have made things better. No. What would have made things better is a real, collective, and effective response to the pandemic. Modeling a real, pro-social, collaborative, and reasonable response to the pandemic.
Of course it's not _fair_ that kids are being kept away from school while hoards of adults are too obsessed with proving they have freedom to consider how to use their freedom to act appropriately. It's not fair that they can't get an education, but hoards of the unmasked, unvaxxed, and unconcerned can huff and puff their way through bars, restaurants, gyms, clubs, and every other super spreader event they care to name without a concern for the costs of their actions to them or anyone else.
Fair would have been for everyone to do their part, to exercise a modicum of self control, and work together to actually contain things, keep them to a reasonable level, and then let things get back to normal in the ways we can, and have a clear plan for how to monitor and react to changes in the future. Fair would be everyone working together to make this thing actually be over, at least for some periods of time, rather than making the reasonable people pay the entire burden for the whims of the hoards of pro-plague cultists.
Society is collapsing under the weight of our reaction to the pandemic, not under the weight of a pandemic itself.
There is no reason why a pandemic that kills fewer than 1% of people would cause anything to collapse. (That's about how many people die every year anyway, of normal causes).
> Fair would have been for everyone to do their part
The current variant spreading like wildfire in the US came from South Africa (or maybe Botswana). The previous one came from India. The original one came from China. Even if we had 100% compliance in the US with whatever measures you want, it wouldn't stop covid, unless we could somehow force everybody in the world to do the same thing, which is impossible.
Nobody has ever satisfyingly explained to me how this meme of "if everybody did the right thing it would all be over by now" makes any sense. Australia, New Zealand, and China are not back to normal yet.
Now that vaccinations are widely available to both the staff and kids, I would like to see a more rigorous adherence to the rigor of the before times.
Regular bus schedules, and regular lunch times, and generally doing sports and activities, within the bounds of circumstantially necessary restrictions, would do my kids a world of good.
My 9yo has developed mildly concerning anxiety and night-terrors over this.
I'm not a parent but I like the sentiment behind the saying, 'Talk to your kids about the changing world order, before someone else does'.
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.
That said, I don't think schools are necessarily the problem. Parenting, and the ability to be proper parents, is the problem.
most parents don't have time to be parents. They're either working double jobs, which leaves little to no time for kids, or they're just putting kids in school to avoid parenting.
I feel like it's a two-way street here. I also think parents are puling kids out of school because they don't want kids to catch Covid, not because the parents _don't_ want to catch Covid. Good parents will do what's best for their kid, and I feel like many parents are trying to be good parents!
It doesn't help that parents are given bad information. There's no trustworthy source of information anymore, outside of your doctors, at least regarding health. But, doctors don't have time to tell every parent what they should / shouldn't do.
Eh, TLDR, the whole system is effed, and people are blaming the easiest targets.
Here’s a thought with less hot air than the NYT: If Covid doesn’t impact kids and the vaccine barely moves the needle on transmission, how about let them go to school, remove the masks, stop jabbing them etc and let them live a normal life. It’s disgusting what we have done to them and the US seems to be one of the worst offenders.
As a teacher, I love the imagery of children just living their lives, free from the weight and realities of this pandemic. I can picture them in the classroom, eager to learn, raising their hands, playing in the playground. It warms my heart.
But the flip side is that I can also picture the teachers and administrators. I see unmasked, unvaxxed, infected parents interacting directly with teachers. I see immunocompromised teachers dying.
I also see their surviving coworkers unable to emotionally handle being in school, with little to no support. Remember, teachers are also simultaneously dealing with the threat of school shootings ever lurking in America. This may sound glib, but have you checked out the price of bullet proof armor? This is a thing teachers and students buy now, along with the other school supplies they buy out of their own pockets. Pens, check; notebook, check; bullet proof backpack, check. Ready for school!
After two years of extra work, pay cuts, staffing shortages, budget cuts, dozens of school shootings, being screamed at by parents, being called traitors to America for teaching its history accurately, many are fed up with it.
If this keeps up, you’re going to end up with Qanon believers teaching your kids. They’re sure that school shootings are staged by crisis actors, and covid isn’t even real, so they’re going to be the only ones left willing to apply for the job. Maybe that’s something you want, but I sure as hell don’t.
At this point I've lost faith in my generation, my parents' generation, and everything in between and outside of that. I don't care what your degree says or does not say. I don't care about your credentials. I don't care about your politics. Everyone has been wrong. MY YOUNG CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CONTINUE WEARING MASKS AT SCHOOL WHEN THEY ARE VACCINATED. That is no way to grow up indeed.
On the other hand, not being able to interact with classmates during school-from-home last year... that had a big effect on their social lives. But now, they see and hang out with their friends (and frenemies) every day. There's a mask on their face -- not a big deal.
And I don't want my kid anywhere near yours then. Mask are not to protect them. Mask are to protect others. Just because someone is vaccinated does not mean they can't spread viruses.
I question if the suffering is necessary:
For Covid, I'm old enough to be at risk of death if I got Covid, but I've had both shots of the Moderna vaccine and also its booster. I may be wrong, but with these shots I f'get about Covid -- I assume I can't get it or transmit it. Again I would hope that others would do the same. Again I may be wrong but I assume that then we could all f'get about Covid, masks, mandates, lock downs, closings, etc. at work, in restaurants, airplanes, schools, etc.
But, for education, hmm .... Dad was pretty good at that, got about the best Master's in education available when he was in college. Then one of his points was that could get a good education in a one room school house with all grades in the one room with just one teacher.
One of the lessons I got from a lot of years in school and some years of teaching is "Learning is not a spectator sport". That is, learning happens mostly from work between the ears of the learner.
To me, these are very special, especially good, times for learning -- we have the Internet. Darned near anything anyone might want to learn is on the Internet as text or videos, including in organized full courses.
I know a family with three kids, 10, 7, and 2. They go to a private school, three short days a week and then study at home. It appears that Covid has not hurt their education and that they are doing fine. At the school, each mother volunteers one day a month. Since there are only about 12 school days a month, it takes only 12 students to have a mother there each school day.
I would hope that parents could do well with their kids educations through (a) reading and writing essays, (b) math through graphing data, compound interest, exponententials, areas, and volumes, (c) other topics such as literature, geography, history, music, etc.
Then somewhere about age 10-12, the kids should be able to do well learning, with some guidance and standardized testing, essentially on their own from materials on the Internet or, in some cases, from books. Uh, some kids, even in some of the worst schools, somehow do really well learning basketball, baseball, football, soccer, auto mechanics, and more -- properly motivated they should also be able to learn chemistry, biology, calculus, physics, computer programming, etc.
Oh and my Paternal Grandfather was a headmaster and had to evacuate his entire dam school.
I think a lot of right wing commentators and journalists have got to close to the hard right.
Now is same. we definitely sacrified our youth mental health,jobs, starting a family dreams, starting salary, hopes, future retirement, cost of renting an apartment, never ever hopes of buying a place and confined them in small third-rate boomer-owned apartment so that old people don't die from covid. many more healthy young people will die from this than they could have died from covid.
it is our western society and leaders that made this choice for us because our olds own all the power (just look at trump and biden pelosi age). and western leaders made this decision just like japan elderly people made the choice to go clean fukushima reactor so that their youth doesn't die from doing it.
I guess people need to make a choice. what kind of society do we wish to live in.
This is true right up until one is old enough to vote. One of the most frustrating realizations as I've gotten older (I graduated during the great recession too) is that younger people don't vote while older people do. Most of what you listed could be fixed or at least vastly improved if younger demographics actually bothered to address issues that impact them, because older people certainly do.
- Expensive housing could be addressed by younger voters pressing their local council to permit more units. Instead we have wealthy and older people pressing for the opposite.
- Starter jobs/salary etc. could be helped if younger people pressed their politicians to update minimum wage/paid leave etc. Yet we don't.
- Healthcare etc. could be universal, instead it's only universal for people of a certain age (read: the demographic that votes).
I get that not all issues are solvable by young people, and pinning all their issues on them isn't productive, but there's so much that could be improved if they simply looked after themselves the way older people do.
Of course the NYT omits that schools were open in several states, but that would be too much reality in a single dose.
=> Why don't they use it?
What are they supposed to bargain with? They are (as a population, individuals may be exceptions to this) fundamentally dependent upon the adult population for their existence. Food, shelter, clothing, transportation is all (in the US) provided by adults for the vast majority of kids, at least below age 16, and still the majority for most 16/17 year olds. If we permit 18-20 year olds to still be counted as "kids", they are still poor and a very small voting bloc that is notorious for not showing up to vote, even if they are increasingly independent.
I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease with no mitigations to make money.
Surely they exist if you're making a comment like this, right?
Does it really need explaining that besides making money, work is also used to keep our society running?
Do you like things such as...say, FOOD?
Get in line behind gun violence, vehicle accidents, and drowning at the beach.
At what point do we decide that totally evidence-free hysterical claims like this are as much misinformation as anti-vaxx posting is?
After two years and 300,000,000 cases worldwide, don't we have enough data by now to know that Covid isn't a major health risk for children?