18 ms·

Freddie de Boer just wrote something on his Substack about this - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-warm-safe-healthy https://freddiede

• trenchgun 5y ago
  Yes.
• brightball 5y ago
  IMO this is probably the best solution.
• double_nan 5y ago
  I’m wondering what has changed in the human nature (if any) that we need day care for ppl older than 18-19 years now. What did such ppl do 100 (or 1000) years ago to overcome all that.
  • imgabe 5y ago
    We don't. Schools are mostly people under 18.
  • autarch 5y ago
    I'm not following. The vast majority of people in school are younger than 18. I agree with you that it should be fine for most parents to leave an older kid (say 14+?) at home alone. But again, some kids just want to go to school to get some damn food, regardless of age!
    • double_nan 5y ago
      I’m mostly curious about why the maturity period was prolonged by 5-10 years from what the human race had 100 or 1000 years ago. I’m not talking about education but the transition from youths to adulthood.
      • ekanes 5y ago
        As the world becomes more complex, childhood understandably gets longer.
      • technothrasher 5y ago
        Because we continue to gain a better understanding of how people mature. We now recognize that the period of adolescence is a long one, and that life outcomes are typically better when you do not push people directly into adult roles in society immediately after they reach puberty.
      • fisherjeff 5y ago
        In 1922, a 14-year-old in the US could expect to live maybe another 40 years; in 2022, that number is likely to be at least 70. As a fraction of life expectancy, adolescence is actually relatively short right now.
        • iainmerrick 5y ago
          Do you have a citation for that? I’m not sure it’s correct (although I don’t have any links of my own handy either, sorry!) My impression was that infant mortality was a great deal higher back then, but there wasn’t as big a disparity after that as people tend to assume. People didn’t hit old age in their 50s and 60s, they often lived into their 80s and beyond, just like today.
        • eggy 5y ago
          Quality of life over quantity should be a metric somehow. Sure the internet and access for more people should raise the bar, but I am not sure about that. A lot of noise out there. Yes, an average life expectancy of 78 years in the US, sounds like a lot compared to around 60 in the 1920s, but with a current obesity prevalence of over 40% (obesity and severe obesity) in the US, I am not sure we can gauge a year-for-a-year in this comparison. And people wonder why an advanced country such as the US can get hit so bad by COVID, and blame it on each other, when over 70% of deaths and serious hospitalizations are linked to obesity. I think we can allow children to mature as early as they seem to be able to take it on, and not over pressure them while doing this; isn't that what being a parent is all about - assessing and nurturing together? I certainly had to grow up quick living below or at the poverty line in a bad neighborhood in my childhood and all that entailed, along with my relatives sent at age 18 to 22 to Korea, Vietnam, and other wars that followed. Children who grew/grow up on farms with chores and responsibilities and with similar corollaries in cities at an early age sounds better to me than coddling them into their mid-twenties, but that is my opinion from the various young people I have interviewed and worked with in white-collar and blue-collar jobs (construction, diving, ropework, machining, welding, etc...) as well as to the older and younger children I have raised in my family.
  • auslegung 5y ago
    Children can be raised as people who serve a purpose, not as a burden to serve. And just like adults, children thrive knowing they are wanted, and their actions make a difference. Children can have real chores as early as 3 or 4 years old, and by 18 can be expected to have developed the character and know how to be completely on their own. That’s not to say they wouldn’t continue to benefit, for the rest of their lives, from a nurturing, supportive, diverse community. But they can be a completely productive member of that community.
• ubiquitysc 5y ago
  Yeah the approach of everyone being remote or no one being remote seems shortsighted.
  • Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Books have been remote learning for hundreds of years, whats wrong with remote learning especially now pupils can ask questions straight away from a pool of teachers online?
    • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Even hundreds of years ago there were classrooms with teachers.
      • Terry_Roll 5y ago
        Simply because technology was slow back then, if the technology existed for faster than horseback/carrier pigeon communication and costs were not prohibitive would the world of teaching/knowledge acquisition have evolved a different form of society?
    • kevincox 5y ago
      The biggest problem is that a huge component of school is socialization. Interacting with other kids in an low-control setting. Much like conferences the "hallway class" is a huge component. Ass onto that that many kids are bad at focusing on online classes and the whole situation is not up to the standard of in-persin schooling (with current systems).
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  >> The National School Boards Association says that 1,384,000 public school students are homeless. Holy fucking crap. (Sorry I don't normally react like that, and even given homeless might not be "living on street", that is a horrific statistic)
  • WaitWaitWha 5y ago
    We should have zero homeless children. That said the definition of "homeless" in this count is extremely broad. For example if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless. Even if someone stays temporarily in a hotel or motel, for example because of a fire or flood, will be counted as homeless. Even wider scope, a child who "qualified moved" within the last 36 months is considered migratory i.e. homeless. https://nche.ed.gov/mckinney-vento-definition/ https://nche.ed.gov/mckinney-vento-definition/ ) (I understand pointing out incomplete [is there a better word?] facts is unpopular.)
    • tartoran 5y ago
      Living in a hotel does qualify as homeless in my opinion. Same as trailer or anything that is not a fixed home. The definition of homeless doesn not equate to just to simply sleeping under the stars.
      • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        I grew up in West Virginia. A LOT of people lived in a trailer - as in they actually owned the trailer and in many cases the land, too (my parents). Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? And even if you're renting... Why count someone who rents a trailer as homeless but not someone who rents an apartment?
        • barry-cotter 5y ago
          > Why does it make sense to count these people as homeless? It's a social class thing. It's not about having a reliable, warm, dry, safe place to sleep. It's about whether a middle class university graduate's friends would have considered them to have failed at life. Living in a coffin sized apartment with cockroaches everywhere in New York is something they could see themselves doing at some point in their life for career goals or because of bad luck. A trailer is not the kind of place a university graduate lives in.
• paul7986 5y ago
  give kids the chance to choose to go to school or not ... most won't go and then outside of learning the biggest benefit of socializing/making freinds/fully enjoy being human which to me is with others is lost. People at my job have given the same choose and really no one goes in. COVID is scourge to the world ... whose is to blame for it? Does any one country benefit from it? What's going on with Covid in China ... when will they rank as the number superpower in the world ... last i saw in the next five to ten years. If you downvote me do you think the Chinese govt. is one to trust ... good for societies around the world? The world is now living like they were in the 2000s to present... with a mask on!
  • warning26 5y ago
    > give kids the chance to choose to go to school or not ... most won't go I mean...that's really up to the parents, not the kids.
  • paul7986 5y ago
    Just getting downvoted yet no one is saying why!?!
    • astrange 5y ago
      You type like a grandparent texting. Why so many ellipses?
      • paul7986 5y ago
        lol your not responding to what I was asking just being a troll The world needs to come down on China's govt or it's just going to get worse for every country that isnt them!
    • staticman2 5y ago
      Since you asked, your rant about China would appear to be off topic. My guess that's one reason you were downvoted.
  • 7952 5y ago
• darth_avocado 5y ago
  It will be year 3 of covid and this is 100% the fault of the same people who have created every other problem in the education system: the administrators. There is no perfect way to open schools, that much is certain after looking at other countries. But looking at the state of things, it doesn’t even seem like people are trying. Japan has students come in on alternate days, so that the school can operate at 50% capacity. Mask mandates, social distancing and temperature checks are enforced strictly. Sweden has kept its schooling open (although it has had covid outbreaks, but the numbers were similar to Finland where the schools were closed). Uruguay opened up schools early for its most vulnerable kids. The point being, there are different ways to solve the problem, but only in America, can we be stuck with the worst way to do it.
  • sylens 5y ago
    I don't fault any schools for struggling from March 2020 to June 2020, being thrown into the pandemic and remote learning with no warning. But I was absolutely astonished to see that most administrators took the summer of 2020 off, assuming that everybody would be back in school that fall and things would be normal. They wasted several months of time that could've been spent planning contingencies and how remote learning might work better than just pure zoom. I always thought that schools should have considered something I saw done at a SANS training course once. While there were ~20 people in attendance, there were also several people attending virtually. Those virtual attendees had a surrogate in the room, whose job was to monitor chat/messages from the virtual attendees and raise his hand to ask a question to the instructor - as if they were there in person. This allowed the instructor to teach the course as he normally would, using a full projection screen, white board, and other materials. This surrogate method would have allowed teachers to be in their classrooms drawing on blackboards, using charts, posters, and other instructional aids they've spent years building, instead of having to pivot completely to PowerPoint. It's a shame to see absolutely no creativity or thinking outside the box among school administrators.
    • another_story 5y ago
      Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.
• odonnellryan 5y ago
  I 100% agree. My high school in the US was a shit show. It was basically like the redditor described but there was no COVID. Going to school is still valuable.
• sealeck 5y ago
  The problem is that a major part of the value of universal education is that it provides a means to provision social welfare without stigma – telling only children who need this support to come in undoes this.
• ageofwant 5y ago
  School is not supposed to be daycare for the economy...
  • astrange 5y ago
    Yes it is. School, along with the other things it does, is a public daycare service for children aged 5-18. That's one of the main reasons public school is good.
    • herbst 5y ago
      That is a POV thing. Where I am it is even considered weird that the US sees food a responsibility of educational services.
      • peatmoss 5y ago
        Two reasons for schools to provide food: - Students are generally compelled to be proximate to educational services for long stretches of time. Logistics of not coupling them would be inefficient. - Students don't learn effectively when they are chronically hungry. Providing education to hungry students isn't maximizing society's investment in these comparatively expensive services. - Bonus reason: for many students, school is the only institution they have significant contact with, and therefore nobody else is feeding them. Feeding kids is the Right and Moral thing to do.
        • herbst 5y ago
          Students here eat too, the different is they eat what they, or their parents want them to. And when they want to. Most schools also sell food. Nobody has to be hungry. The difference is there is no super cheap daily meal all students have to choose from. And also kids and public schools can get healthy food if their parents want to/ can afford it.
          • peatmoss 5y ago
            Based on your description, I gather you are not in the United States :-) In my opinion the best case is a society where all kids have parents with the care and understanding to send them to school with nutritious, healthy food. And that students have healthy choices and that they have the means to purchase. But the kicker, is that in the United States (and some other countries), this is not the case. In the United States, children in dysfunctional or impoverished homes or no home are common enough that it's more efficient to broadly provide support in this manner. Side note: my wife, who previously was a teacher, and I lived in New Zealand for a few years. New Zealand didn't have a school nutrition program, but probably needed one. My wife did a fair amount of substitute ("relief") teaching in a poor area north of Wellington when we first arrived, and gave her lunch away to hungry students often enough that she knew to pack several sandwiches. So, even countries with comparably strong social supports can run into this issue.
• pezzana 5y ago
  This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society. It's not working. The additional strain on schools has turned the mission of public education into a series of brush fires in which staff and administrators just lurch from one crisis to another. The unequal way that education gets funded means that some districts see much more of this than others. But the problem is spreading. Teachers are not trained to function as warehousers for youth. Nor are they given the resources to serve the role you and far too many parents want them to serve. When the schools fail there is literally nothing behind them. They're the end of the line. This is the point where all the chickens come home to roost and society starts to fail, one kid at a time. The pandemic should be a wake up call. It doesn't look like it will be.
  • autarch 5y ago
    > This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society. I completely agree. But we can't fix this in the next few weeks, so for now keeping schools open for those who need it is the thing to do.
• evnc 5y ago
  I sympathize with this, but how can you even effectively operate a school to provide the day care part if half the staff are absent? (Either directly because they are sick with covid, or caring for a family member who is, or they lack childcare for their own kids, or simply because they're not being paid enough to deal with the bullshit and risk ...) It just seems like, regardless of our values, the sheer weight of the case rates and staff shortages is going to force closures in the near term if it hasn't already. If you put a bunch of vulnerable kids in an auditorium together with minimal supervision because you've got an effective teacher:student ratio of 1:50 or worse, is that really better? (Maybe it is. I'll admit to not having come from a dysfunctional or unsafe home as the author of the linked piece describes, so I may lack some perspective here.)