thomas leverett weblog

Annals of Public Education IV

It's a new day, one in which your public school might not be safe. It is not their fault. I love the public schools, especially ours here in this village, but sometimes one has to face the facts.

I have raised ten children, and am down to the last three, who are 12, 14 and 15. The public schools have treated them and the other seven very well over the years; I have no complaint. The last few years of my teaching career I was a substitute in a nearby town and got a close look at public education and all its problems. One of them is that we have come to rely on them for moral education and abuse prevention, but that's not their fault either. In order to keep people safe, they instituted some procedures (if you have a fever, go home and stay home for 24 hours) and parents just had to live with those procedures. They instituted other procedures that protected students from the fact that society is armed to the teeth and there is virtually no way to keep an armed shooter out of the school under most circumstances.

But I digress. The present situation, where Trump/DeVos say "Go back to school" and the health experts say, "that's not safe!" or "you have to do x y & z before it's safe" places a burden on the schools that they will collapse under. You don't catch Trump/DeVos saying "We want your children to have the best education possible," and that's because they are not motivated by that, or don't care about that, or simply have other priorities. So, the bottom line is, if you want your kids (and yourself, by extension) to be safe, and you want them to have a good education, you're on your own.

The people who survive this pandemic are going to be the ones who take care of their families, by keeping them safe, and avoid public gatherings with enclosed ventilation systems. You cannot keep an asymptomatic transmitter out of a school building because, unlike the AK-47, you can't see the covid. You can see the AK-47, and you still can't keep it out of the building. Parents who are smart will work on other systems fast, and should have two goals: keep your kids safe, and, give them a good education.

I have two pieces of good information. One is that zoom works. The other is that the one-room schoolhouse model works, too. Both will take a lot of adjustment and fine-tuning before they work well.

It's the boys who hate zoom the most. I have one who doesn't do so well on zoom. He also wouldn't do so well on parent-child home schooling. The school has done a pretty good job with him and I would love to send him back to school. There is no way he could stay six feet from everyone and wear a mask. I will be the first to admit we have become soft about that kind of discipline, where a kid will actually sit still in an isolated chair and just do his work when he has to. But I know it can be done, because I've seen it. I know zoom can work, because I've seen that too.

I've spent the lockdown studying my pioneer ancestors. They learned about twenty times as much stuff (logic, Latin, geography, grammar, etc.) in about a twentieth of the time we spend, and here we are, sitting around arguing about whether it's worthwhile to teach cursive in what little time we have. We are down to the bare bones in mathematics, and it's because people don't understand "exponential growth" (particularly Trump, DeVos, & friends, and those who elected them), that we're in the pickle we're in. So we've had a number of problems with the system as it is, for many years, and that won't change. Even if we elect a Democrat immediately, it will take years to rebuild and the damage will be immeasurable in the meantime.

The pioneers followed several simple rules: Keep the kids busy so that they value education in the two winter weeks when they are snowed in and actually have time to engage in it. Second, get neighbors and bind together, so you get the best of collective skills of the community and you have a reasonable set of goals to set up when they are learning; and, third, cut your losses if you have to; if they refuse to learn, let them go out and work, or, let them live with their own consequences. A single room with all twelve grades will work, and kids will learn how to chop wood, winterize, etc. in the process of taking care of their own site. The older will teach the younger. The community will all become more involved and notice what is being learned and taught.

So, to the question of "What should a single parent do?"(in the present situation) I would answer: Start here. If school is unsafe, you need to find another way. Find family to supervise. Find a community to share schooling. Find some way to educate your kid and be safe. A kid can lose a few weeks while you get organized. But the covid is not going anywhere; on the contrary, it's getting worse. Your #1 priority is surviving, and education is right up there: you need to find the best way to educate your kid in difficult circumstances.

To those who are concerned about abuse, I would answer: That wasn't the school's job in the first place. A community and family should watch out for its abused kids, yes. If the government has to step in and remove abused kids from their home, ok. But relying on the school to make sure that happened was probably a mistake to begin with anyway. Stop worrying about how those kids will get by. If you know some, worry about them; get involved, do what you can. But don't use that as an excuse to prop up a school that can no longer do its job. The school is not a social service agency whose job it is to check on the welfare of every kid in a community every day. A school is a resource for learning and knowing what kids can learn at each level - and that's how we should use it.

There is one more possibility which I have been advocating for years. A large system of schooling + daycare, free for all parents, which would ensure that every kid is both safe and educated, would allow all parents to work, and would save a bundle in welfare payments for those parents who presently stay home because they have to care for their kids. This would be enormously expensive, though, and would have to be organized carefully. If the government is forcing people to go back to school without regard for safety and without stating that they care about the quality of the education, that doesn't bode well for enlarging the system and making sure that all kids are safe and well-educated, and fed, and given moral supervision, all year round. If people had simply aligned themselves behind Bernie we could have been talking about that, but Bernie couldn't even win the majority of Democrats, so I don't really believe this society is ready for it.

In order to start or run anything, we need a collective agreement. Almost a third of this country doesn't care what happens to the schools, and even the Congress didn't prevent DeVos from getting in there and dismantling them. It's we, the people, who are going to have to stand up for the education of our own children, in order to prevent this country from going down under the weight of the sheer ignorance that lack of education has engendered. We've had enough of that, even before this covid cleared out everyone who couldn't stay out of harm's way. And the covid is just getting started. I was a math teacher, and I know a little about exponential growth. Stay home and take care of yourself; it's getting worse, and we're in for a rough ride.

I want to make one more thing clear. I love the schools; I know them and love the people in them. If I still taught there, I don't know what I'd do. Teaching is an enormously gratifying occupation. But exposing yourself unnecessarily to fatal disease is a losing proposition. If the schools can get these teachers on zoom effectively, it's a win-win, but it may take a while to work. And some kids, like my own, just need personal motivation, and aren't going to make it on zoom. I think there is hope here. We have the tools, we have the talent, we have the resources, and we have generations of knowing what is important for kids to learn. We are an inventive and innovative people, and the first step is getting in touch with what we can do to solve this problem and make education useful and safe and even fun for everyone. Some kids are going to need special attention, yes. We the people need to speak up about what we want, and save the public school system, as we know it, so it will work for everyone, and be safe.

Labels: public education

posted by tom @ 10:28 AM