On one hand, I'm glad that a lot of hard truths are being acknowledged now. On the other hand, I rewrote this sentence like 4 times to take out all the f-words. nytimes.com/2021/09/08/mag…
A year ago I seethed in the @TheSpectator (spectatorworld.com/topic/children…) that poor kids would be left behind while the wealthy would hire tutors and be fine. Now we know it has happened:
This is the education commissioner for Tennessee. Sorry but no, it is someone's fault. It's the fault of every single person who kept schools closed. Period.
No. It was not. Children in much of the world had a relatively normal school experience last year. America was unique in that our urban centers cowered to teachers' unions and kept schools closed. We did a bad, stupid thing. It was not an impossible choice at all.
We treated remote schooling like an equal option. It was not. It was a disaster. All honest people knew it would be. Anyone who has ever interacted with children knew they could not learn like that. But the unions won.
All the people who told us remote learning was fine and kids were doing great are the same people who now say that masking is fine and kids love it. There are things that are obvious and we ignore these things at our own peril.
It's not ok. What we did was not ok.
The second paragraph contradicts the first.
A functioning society does not allow this to happen and then does not shrug it off. A functioning society looks at these facts and resolves to do things differently, better, and not continue to put kids last as we are still doing right now. Normalize everything for kids now.
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