This is obviously a very silly justification for reopening schools.
But it seems to me even the less silly ones (concerns about kids falling behind, etc) are rooted in a very American expectation that everything must happen exactly as it is supposed to happen. Not wrong but 1/
But it seems to me even the less silly ones (concerns about kids falling behind, etc) are rooted in a very American expectation that everything must happen exactly as it is supposed to happen. Not wrong but 1/
But also the sort of expectation you have if your country has blessed enough to have lived in peace and propoperity for generations. 2/
My mother missed a couple of years of formal education because of war or the threat of war and learned from home in fairly unstructured way - one year she spent a good part of the year reading Austen, Dickens, and Melville novels. 3/
My father went to a grade school in China in WW II where several grades were collapsed into one because there were not enough teachers and where by modern American standards the classroom sizes were way too large and students had to share books. 4/
And friends with relatives who grew up during the Lebanese civil war - where schools only reopened during lulls in fighting - tell similar stories. 5/
Which is not to say schools shouldn’t reopen if we can do so safely. But it is to remind, as my mother constantly reminds me, kids are more resilient and adaptive than we give them credit for. 6/
My father, in fact, decribed the chaotic WW II years of his education (large multi-grade classes, shared books and all) as the best years of school he had in part because they were less rigorously tracked and planned out. 7/
