5 ms·

It's common experience that children bring home all sorts of sniffles from school, there's a noticeable uptick in upper respiratory tract infections when the ne

It's common experience that children bring home all sorts of sniffles from school, there's a noticeable uptick in upper respiratory tract infections when the new school years starts in the fall. Many of these are caused by coronaviruses. With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence.

threatofrain 6y ago
> With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence. Saying "clinical" here is a bit of wishful thinking. Clinical testing would mean random selection and random assignment in a medical experiment for kids. With an adverse hypothesis.
nickff 6y ago
The push to start school is based on the perceived economic necessity (arguably a cost-benefit analysis), of providing childcare for parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17.
- dripton 6y ago
  I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. We can probably split the difference some on this between elementary school (where the babysitting really is kind of economically important) and the older kids.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    > I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. From a national perspective of producing competitive individuals in an increasingly international landscape? Yes, they do. They need at least a few hours of their day coached by an institution to direct their energies towards their studies. Otherwise Khan Academy would already solve 85% of the problems, because it is closely aligned to state curricula.
    - dripton 6y ago
      That's education, not babysitting. I totally agree that high school is important, but it should be geared more for teaching than for supervision. While elementary school does both.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - csa 6y ago
        I think that you grossly overestimate the median (or lower) teenager’s ability to behave responsibly when unsupervised. Note that the median teenager (or lower), while possibly college-bound, is not really qualified for college and is not very academically inclined. Also note that they are decidedly not middle class or higher. They are constantly pushing and testing boundaries without the received wisdom to know when they have gone too far. One of my biggest criticisms of modern day K-12 education, especially high school, is that it is mostly glorified baby sitting given the low amount of learning that takes place at the lower-end schools. The high school curriculum that we use today is roughly based on the same curriculum from late 1800s to early 1900s when only about 6% of people graduated from high school, and pretty much all of them went to college or a two-year school of some sort. High school was specifically designed to cater to college bound students. A variant of this curriculum is used today even though approximately half of college-age students don’t go to college (including most high school dropouts). The curricular mismatch is a joke, and the only real reason high school can be justified for these students is, unfortunately, tax-funded babysitting.
      - threatofrain 6y ago
        And Khan Academy is the proxy for education without supervision. If teenagers didn't need supervision, than Khan Academy would already be doing 85% of the job, as it's a top-notch resource for education.
    - blub 6y ago
      Judging by the emotional fragility of college students and adults in the US, but also other countries which feel that words are violence and feel unsafe at the slightest sign of criticism of their ideas you might have a point that there's high demand for babysitters.
  - Reedx 6y ago
    I hope most 13 year olds don't need babysitters. At that age you're fully capable of staying home by yourself and following online instruction, at minimum.
- fileeditview 6y ago
  It is very important for the development of the children to continue their education and socialize. Basically every child you ask will tell you it wants to go back to school. Making this about economics is nonsense. It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other useless activities. Disclaimer: this obviously varies from country to country.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    I think there's an interesting rhetorical split and contradiction. The same politic groups, that would argue that teachers are the heroes of society that we can't live without, are now arguing that school must under no circumstance resume. We must indefinitely put off in-person schooling. What? Is this the best we can do? Does this even measure up with scientific reality and risk calculation? Are teachers really that simultaneously important/unimportant? If the grocery baggers are working and handling the crisis well enough, so should teachers. It's clear that there's a class element to "essential worker." And this entire profession that seems to love the praise they generally receive from the left about how indispensable they are, are now suspiciously absent from the essential worker category. You can only conclude that the social and mental development of children isn't essential. If they cared enough, they'd use this crisis as an opportunity to start hiring younger teachers in droves to build up the workforce with relatively inexperienced teachers who aren't at much risk from the virus (at least compared to some 50-60yo teacher). But I suspect unions would stop at nothing to impede adaptive, efficient, and creative solutions.
    - bfdm 6y ago
      Buying food is necessary to stay alive. Kids attending school in person is not. If there were a real plan in place to ensure safety, and if adults were willing to sacrifice in other areas like going out to bars then school could work if we had consistent isolated groups. As it stands, at least in Ontario, there's been a strong push to "open up" bars and restaurants etc which to me is public mixing incompatible with the mixing of students in a class. Pick one: school or everything else.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I think there's some schools that are doing a real cost-benefit analysis. It's going to be a gigantic, overbearing social problem when we get to 2022 and realize all the most disadvantaged students are a year behind. I know many people don't think that's worth the cost, but you have to acknowledge that some decisionmakers do. The schools that opened up, did minimial distancing, and then shut down because they detected cases? Yeah, they were clearly in the wishful thinking camp.
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
It's wishful thinking about how it will turn out (clearly it's not working out like people wanted) with a lot of magical thinking, and political expediency. The economy is hurting, and if you are a leading politician, you want the economy to improve, for people to see there is an end in sight and that we can go back to normal. All these motivations can be true at the same time. America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.

threatofrain 6y ago

> With that in mind, the push to start school is based on wishful thinking, not on clinical evidence. Saying "clinical" here is a bit of wishful thinking. Clinical testing would mean random selection and random assignment in a medical experiment for kids. With an adverse hypothesis.

nickff 6y ago

The push to start school is based on the perceived economic necessity (arguably a cost-benefit analysis), of providing childcare for parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17.

dripton 6y ago
I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. We can probably split the difference some on this between elementary school (where the babysitting really is kind of economically important) and the older kids.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  > I hope most 17-year-olds don't need babysitters. From a national perspective of producing competitive individuals in an increasingly international landscape? Yes, they do. They need at least a few hours of their day coached by an institution to direct their energies towards their studies. Otherwise Khan Academy would already solve 85% of the problems, because it is closely aligned to state curricula.
  - dripton 6y ago
    That's education, not babysitting. I totally agree that high school is important, but it should be geared more for teaching than for supervision. While elementary school does both.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - csa 6y ago
      I think that you grossly overestimate the median (or lower) teenager’s ability to behave responsibly when unsupervised. Note that the median teenager (or lower), while possibly college-bound, is not really qualified for college and is not very academically inclined. Also note that they are decidedly not middle class or higher. They are constantly pushing and testing boundaries without the received wisdom to know when they have gone too far. One of my biggest criticisms of modern day K-12 education, especially high school, is that it is mostly glorified baby sitting given the low amount of learning that takes place at the lower-end schools. The high school curriculum that we use today is roughly based on the same curriculum from late 1800s to early 1900s when only about 6% of people graduated from high school, and pretty much all of them went to college or a two-year school of some sort. High school was specifically designed to cater to college bound students. A variant of this curriculum is used today even though approximately half of college-age students don’t go to college (including most high school dropouts). The curricular mismatch is a joke, and the only real reason high school can be justified for these students is, unfortunately, tax-funded babysitting.
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      And Khan Academy is the proxy for education without supervision. If teenagers didn't need supervision, than Khan Academy would already be doing 85% of the job, as it's a top-notch resource for education.
  - blub 6y ago
    Judging by the emotional fragility of college students and adults in the US, but also other countries which feel that words are violence and feel unsafe at the slightest sign of criticism of their ideas you might have a point that there's high demand for babysitters.
- Reedx 6y ago
  I hope most 13 year olds don't need babysitters. At that age you're fully capable of staying home by yourself and following online instruction, at minimum.
fileeditview 6y ago
It is very important for the development of the children to continue their education and socialize. Basically every child you ask will tell you it wants to go back to school. Making this about economics is nonsense. It increasingly baffles me how we accept all kinds of risk every day (e.g. traffic) but in the case of Corona forbid children very important parts of their childhood, while allowing all kinds of other useless activities. Disclaimer: this obviously varies from country to country.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  I think there's an interesting rhetorical split and contradiction. The same politic groups, that would argue that teachers are the heroes of society that we can't live without, are now arguing that school must under no circumstance resume. We must indefinitely put off in-person schooling. What? Is this the best we can do? Does this even measure up with scientific reality and risk calculation? Are teachers really that simultaneously important/unimportant? If the grocery baggers are working and handling the crisis well enough, so should teachers. It's clear that there's a class element to "essential worker." And this entire profession that seems to love the praise they generally receive from the left about how indispensable they are, are now suspiciously absent from the essential worker category. You can only conclude that the social and mental development of children isn't essential. If they cared enough, they'd use this crisis as an opportunity to start hiring younger teachers in droves to build up the workforce with relatively inexperienced teachers who aren't at much risk from the virus (at least compared to some 50-60yo teacher). But I suspect unions would stop at nothing to impede adaptive, efficient, and creative solutions.
  - bfdm 6y ago
    Buying food is necessary to stay alive. Kids attending school in person is not. If there were a real plan in place to ensure safety, and if adults were willing to sacrifice in other areas like going out to bars then school could work if we had consistent isolated groups. As it stands, at least in Ontario, there's been a strong push to "open up" bars and restaurants etc which to me is public mixing incompatible with the mixing of students in a class. Pick one: school or everything else.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I think there's some schools that are doing a real cost-benefit analysis. It's going to be a gigantic, overbearing social problem when we get to 2022 and realize all the most disadvantaged students are a year behind. I know many people don't think that's worth the cost, but you have to acknowledge that some decisionmakers do. The schools that opened up, did minimial distancing, and then shut down because they detected cases? Yeah, they were clearly in the wishful thinking camp.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago

It's wishful thinking about how it will turn out (clearly it's not working out like people wanted) with a lot of magical thinking, and political expediency. The economy is hurting, and if you are a leading politician, you want the economy to improve, for people to see there is an end in sight and that we can go back to normal. All these motivations can be true at the same time. America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.