Says one highly rated comment at "Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic/Some families have come to prefer stand-alone virtual schools and districts are rushing to accommodate them — though questions about remote learning persist" (NYT).
Another comment: "If this last year has taught me nothing else, it's that the 'digital world' is not a life worth living, and I am an introvert. I did not exactly have a successful social life in school, but I would still never trade the experience for being a hermit at home. People need to learn to get along with each other now more than ever before. Online school is an acceptable back up for times when in-person schooling is not possible such as when a student is sick, what would otherwise be a snow day, pandemics, travel demands and the like, all of these are better than the prior alternative of no school. But that's all it is, a mediocre substitute for the real thing and real people."
It's worth clicking through to see the photography at the top of the article. I really can't decide what feelings and ideas the NYT meant to highlight. It's a mother enveloping her 11-year-old son in a hug. The sun is on his face and he looks blissful. The text says he suffers from some sort of mental condition that makes him "apprehensive around other students" and that he's loved the on-line school program. But, we're told, he's going back to school, so I'm going to say that the NYT means to say all-encompassing motherly love cannot be the end point. That boy needs to get back into the real world of other kids. Which is what the commenters are saying.
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३ टिप्पण्या:
Alex writes:
I've generally enjoyed working from home during the pandemic. I don't have to commute, can better control my diet, and have more time to exercise. But the lack of any social contact is depressing. I miss social dancing, metalworking classes, etc. Humans need other human contact. If we don't get it, we go insane. Even "introverts."
Regarding schools, my hope is that this breaks the paradigm of the massive school building crammed with students. Online learning isn't the only answer; there are plenty of possibilities that range between those two extremes. We need to build a robust marketplace full of diverse options, rather than going back to the highly fragile system pre-pandemic.
Washington Blogger writes:
I live in a somewhat rural community with lots of homeschooling families. I have homeschooled all 6 of my kids (the oldest now attending LU up in your neighborhood.) I have seen the good and bad of this kind of education. However, let me say that most homeschool environments are not similar to this year's distance learning, so it is helpful to distinguish between staying home to learn and doing everything remotely. Let me say that remote learning sucks. I have taught this year using remote learning, and the engagement factor between teacher and student is horrible. I had motivated and engaged students in spirit, but that engagement did not work while on-line. What a welcome relief it is now that we can finish the year in person. The interaction I had the first time we met again in person was so improved that I was literally high on endorphins by the end of the day. The teens in my household who are still at home have had remote college classes and have not enjoyed them, though they managed well given their familiarity with learning at home.
Leaning through Zoom is simply not ideal, but it has its value. In many cases with teens who are homeschooled in my area, they often join coops with instructor led classes that meet once a week. So for one day a week they have live, in-person interaction with the instructor, and one or two days a week they might have supplemental zoom calls to keep them on pace and to help them when they get stuck.
As for socialization. I was once a skeptic too. Before I had children I thought homeschoolers were backwoods hicks with kids who would not know how to relate to people. And then I met homeschooled children. These were well-adjusted, bright, socially adept people who had none of the negative baggage of attending a school with kids who continually tried to tear them down. And if anyone is thinking that without the opportunity to learn how to deal with bullies, and such at school, how would they learn to adapt to adult life, let me say, that junior high and high school do more to ruin your ability to relate in a real world than help you. Most people you meet as adults are not at all like the children you meet in school. In adult life you rarely meet people who drive you toward cutting, suicide, depression, and other negative responses. However, that does not mean kids should be raised entirely isolated from peers. All my kids have tons of healthy relationships, we just make sure they are associating with people who have been well brought up and don't undermine them at every turn. One of my daughters works locally with a lot of other teens and it is sad to hear her report how negative her experience is with those teens who are just normal teens in our neighborhood. There is so much subtle digging and manipulation in each interaction, she can clearly see the difference between one group of kids and another based on how they interact with and treat their peers.
So, I say it's fine that kids don't return to in-person school, but it is not fine for them to closet themselves in their homes and do everything by computer (there are always exceptions.) Make your own little school community with like-minded families and share the teaching load or hire a tutor (I have been such a tutor in math and science for 15 years.)
JK writes:
Ludwig von Mises delved into schooling in a diverse society a century ago. Now that diversity is promoted over the melting pot, US schooling as a political prize has risen in stakes. Those who believe they control the “indoctrination” naturally pushback at students escaping the coercion of the “approved” curriculum. I believe a more modern view, with the focus on the diversity of students, would be for school vouchers over pulling all public funds.
"If one leaves to the parents the choice of the school to which they wish to send their children, then one exposes them to every conceivable form of political coercion. In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions. … But even if we eliminate the spiritual coercion exercised by compulsory education, we should still be far from having done everything that is necessary in order to remove all the sources of friction between the nationalities living in polyglot territories. The school is one means of oppressing nationalities— perhaps the most dangerous, in our opinion— but it certainly is not the only means." — Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism (pp. 115-116)
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