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Keeping kids out of school and not receiving a proper education is a serious issue, and keeping schools shut down is certainly not sustainable at all. But, and

Keeping kids out of school and not receiving a proper education is a serious issue, and keeping schools shut down is certainly not sustainable at all. But, and this speaks to your point about binary arguments, why are our only options presented to us "open schools as we normally would" or "keep them closed"? It seems to me that there are many ways that education systems could be re-tooled by the time school opens in the fall to enable education while substantially reducing risk of infection. To me the question is if there is a will to make those changes and compromises. It really seems to me like there isn't, and I think that is the part that distresses me the most among all of this.

tripletao 6y ago
I certainly agree that elementary schools (a) should reopen on site, and (b) should reopen with measures to slow the spread of coronavirus. I've already seen discussion of (b) in the press, and that gives me some optimism. I hope a month from now, we're arguing e.g. about whether kids should be held entirely in a single class (to minimize the total number of kids that one infected could expose) vs. allowed to take electives. That seems a lot more productive to me than just pro/anti "lockdown". And while I'm here, I think the proposals to move university education entirely or mostly remote are insane. College students are themselves at very low risk from this, and they live mostly with college students. We should take measures to protect those at risk (help students living with their parents to instead live with classmates, let older professors lecture remotely while TAs run the class, etc.), but the cost of moving that online-only again seems huge to me.