In a belated triumph of sanity, schools around the world are closing their doors in the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak.
The debates about schools closing make it clear how schools provide value.
Here in New York City, and in many other places, we are refusing to close to schools until (two weeks after the) last minute because schools provide free meals to poor children.
The other stated reason is because if children are not in school, their parents would be unable to work, and some of their parents are healthcare workers or cannot afford any missed paychecks.
(In the case of universities, we also have places like Harvard that took away students’ housing and thus left them with no place to live.)
These are good, real concerns. We need solutions to these problems.
But we also now know what real problems are being solved.
We have school because our society believes that one cannot leave children unsupervised or terrible things would happen, for very broad values of children. We also have school because we don’t have another way to ensure that children get to eat. And in some narrow cases, we have a very partial fix for a housing crisis.
Clearly, regardless of what the best solutions are, one could goal factor for these problems much better than ‘mandatory schooling.’
The concern that I have heard literally zero people mention is that closing the schools will prevent children from learning.
I do realize that no one is grappling with how long this is likely to last, and that in the long term they would raise this concern.
But still, I find all of this enlightening. And refreshing.
I suspect the lack of learning is primarily due to the expectations set in the school closures. Here in Seattle they announced schools would only be closed until April 24. So that is a few weeks before and after the already schedule Spring Break. Not a closure for the rest of the school year, which is the more likely reality.
I wonder what happens to all the High School seniors this year. Will the governors just give them a bye and graduate them? How about the universities if the lock downs don’t end by late August? How many freshman would show up for online orientation, paying tens of thousands of dollars for an accredited MOOC vs. deferring freshman year to January or Fall 2021?
Teaching online is way harder than most people think. I taught a hybrid Executive MBA for years and the 1 hour weekly online sessions were way harder to make useful and to teach than the six hour long in-person days once per month. My wife teaches 100% online, fully asynchronous classes at a local college and it took her many years to prep and tune her classes to make them work for all of the various learning styles.
Given that, expect a lot more talk about whether the move to online classes is effective in a month, once most teachers fail at making the transition and with that, the high achieving students complaining.
Previously: The Case Against Education
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
In a belated triumph of sanity, schools around the world are closing their doors in the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak.
The debates about schools closing make it clear how schools provide value.
Here in New York City, and in many other places, we are refusing to close to schools until (two weeks after the) last minute because schools provide free meals to poor children.
The other stated reason is because if children are not in school, their parents would be unable to work, and some of their parents are healthcare workers or cannot afford any missed paychecks.
(In the case of universities, we also have places like Harvard that took away students’ housing and thus left them with no place to live.)
These are good, real concerns. We need solutions to these problems.
But we also now know what real problems are being solved.
We have school because our society believes that one cannot leave children unsupervised or terrible things would happen, for very broad values of children. We also have school because we don’t have another way to ensure that children get to eat. And in some narrow cases, we have a very partial fix for a housing crisis.
Clearly, regardless of what the best solutions are, one could goal factor for these problems much better than ‘mandatory schooling.’
The concern that I have heard literally zero people mention is that closing the schools will prevent children from learning.
I do realize that no one is grappling with how long this is likely to last, and that in the long term they would raise this concern.
But still, I find all of this enlightening. And refreshing.