Education Needs a Greatest Generation
Are you worried your child will fall behind academically because of the pandemic? So worried, that you really want schools to figure out how to reopen so education won’t be further interrupted?
What are you worried they’ll get behind in? One hundred years ago, education was a very different thing. Also fifty years ago, and three hundred years ago, and ten years ago (just before Common Core rolled out). I’m certain ten and twenty years from now, the same will be true.
Right now, in a pandemic, education needs to be a different thing.
I can tell you from experience that education being a different thing has benefits. I chose to educate in a different way, certainly, when most parents now are being compelled to do so. What if everyone — parents, teachers, administrators, policy wonks — stopped fighting this pandemic reality? What if we stopped ignoring the immediate conflict between institutional education and public health and safety, and recognized that right now, education has to become something different?
When education is a different thing, children can discover lifelong interests; they can become proficient in both necessary and helpful skills. A child doesn’t need to graduate high school at 18. A child doesn’t need to learn cursive at a certain age, or earth science, or USA history. A child doesn’t need to learn some things at all in order to become a really wonderful adult. Every child graduates with things they don’t know. Every adult moves through life with things they don’t know.
There is plenty of room in every child’s education for us to keep pandemic safety as the absolute #1 priority.
There are families who cannot arrange to have their kids at home: single parents, essential workers, can’t telecommute; maybe the kids need special services. Maybe the kids won’t have regular meals. (I know, there’s a lot f*cked up in our society.) And there are families who can keep their kids home, but they don’t have sufficient technology to support modified distance learning.
While parents are focused on how their kids’ education will suffer, though, states and districts respond with corresponding proposals, and they’re compromising pandemic safety as a result. We need to shut down that chorus of academic worries and let educators know they need to put absolute priority on the safety of students and staff. We need to let them know that it’s okay if some non-essentials get abandoned, that we and our children will be able to manage, now and later. We need to let them know that we want our children to “fall behind” so lives can be saved.
This is a national and a global crisis, on the scale of World War Two. Most of us don’t remember that time. All but the most wealthy made significant sacrifices (more that’s f*cked up in our society). People had to step into roles and lives and routines they’d never experienced before. Valuable resources of all types were commandeered for the war effort; people endured rationing of just about everything: food, clothing, fuel, and more. There were most definitely situations and decisions and behaviors during World War Two that are nothing to be proud of. But there’s no denying that the global effort to defeat fascism is one of the best things humanity has come together to accomplish.
If we have to ration our kids’s education in order to fight this scourge, don’t you think we should do that? Especially since we know that it’s not forever, and that education has room for disruption. This isn’t the time to complain about property taxes, or SAT scores, or how hard it is to telecommute when the kids are home. People are dying. If you don’t know someone personally, it’s only a matter of time. Let your district know that you’re okay with emergency restructuring, with rationing resources to where they’re most needed, with saving lives being the #1 priority. Let’s be this century’s greatest generation.