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Struggle to think of something more cruel and with less value you could legally subject children to than public schooling. If one good thing comes out of 2020 i

Struggle to think of something more cruel and with less value you could legally subject children to than public schooling. If one good thing comes out of 2020 it will hopefully be a mass realisation that you shouldn't be entrusting your child's future to these people. If the whole of schooling can be replaced by a few videocalls during 2020, what value was it ever really providing.

AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
It's providing babysitting. Children go to school so parents can go to work.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Well, I don't think the value of schools has been replaced by video calls, at all. That's just all we've been able to do. You could live on water and plain crackers for some time, but that doesn't mean it's a complete, healthy, nourishing, replacement for a normal diet.
waterhouse 6y ago
It will be fascinating to see the studies years from now. Comparing things like people who graduated in 2019 vs those who graduated in 2020 (a few months of school disrupted) vs 2021 (more than a year of school disrupted). There may be difficult confounders to deal with, like "the economy also changed a lot due to the pandemic", so it's hard to compare across years; "having already found a job before the pandemic" would also be significant, so it's hard to compare differently-aged people during the same year. The best would be something like comparing people from different U.S. states or cities that are roughly similar, but one city shut down school much longer than the other. (Perhaps even comparing schools, although "whether a school decided to err on the side of staying shut down" probably correlates with something that would affect kids' performance.) Anyway, let me pre-register my prediction that, if good studies can be done, they will show that kids who were forced to miss a year of school (or in-person school, at least) will not have been measurably negatively impacted by it.
kenjackson 6y ago
If anything 2020 has shown us how valuable school is.

AlgorithmicTime 6y ago

It's providing babysitting. Children go to school so parents can go to work.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Well, I don't think the value of schools has been replaced by video calls, at all. That's just all we've been able to do. You could live on water and plain crackers for some time, but that doesn't mean it's a complete, healthy, nourishing, replacement for a normal diet.

waterhouse 6y ago

It will be fascinating to see the studies years from now. Comparing things like people who graduated in 2019 vs those who graduated in 2020 (a few months of school disrupted) vs 2021 (more than a year of school disrupted). There may be difficult confounders to deal with, like "the economy also changed a lot due to the pandemic", so it's hard to compare across years; "having already found a job before the pandemic" would also be significant, so it's hard to compare differently-aged people during the same year. The best would be something like comparing people from different U.S. states or cities that are roughly similar, but one city shut down school much longer than the other. (Perhaps even comparing schools, although "whether a school decided to err on the side of staying shut down" probably correlates with something that would affect kids' performance.) Anyway, let me pre-register my prediction that, if good studies can be done, they will show that kids who were forced to miss a year of school (or in-person school, at least) will not have been measurably negatively impacted by it.

kenjackson 6y ago

If anything 2020 has shown us how valuable school is.