Cognitive dissonance has become a way of life for us in the past ten pandemic months, soon to be a year of 525,600 minutes and very likely at least that many deaths.
But lately I’ve been on the edge of cranial detonation, watching the COVID-19 numbers rise across the country (amid the disarray in which the previous administration’s lack of policy or empathy left the vaccine distribution program) and hearing, simultaneously, cries for the “opening” of school—which is to say, that students be brought back into physical classrooms. An almost ten-day-old headline, reprised today for some reason by Education Week, tells us that “Districts Retreat to Remote Learning Even as Biden Calls for Reopening Schools.”
Let’s be clear that the now-president’s “calls for reopening schools” are materially different from those of COVID deniers like the governor of Florida (pretty much now just a pathetic parody of Popeye the Sailor, trapped in Ali Baba’s cave and wishing he could demand of his can of spinach, “’Open,’ sez ME”). Joe Biden wants schools to be “open,” yes, but he means getting students back into physical classrooms when and only when it is absolutely safe to bring them there.
I think it’s about time that journalists, educators, and politicians find better language than the perniciously cryptic “open” as it’s now too often being used. This usage to imply fully in-person, on-campus schooling erases and devalues the struggles of students and teachers to keep education happening in remote or hybrid form since last March. School has been open, folks, even if school buildings haven’t.
Part of my dismay is that there seems to be, after 400,000 deaths in the United States and millions globally, a willful denial of the absolute fact that just about every teacher and just about every child WANTS, desperately, to be back on campus with colleagues and classmates, walking the hallways unmasked, side by side and arm in arm, just living normal life. No one really likes what’s happening right now, and it’s exhausting, confusing, disheartening, and about every other adjective you can find that implies people working like hell in terribly challenging circumstances.
It’s not as if there is anyone who doesn’t want to be back in the physical schools we all remember, even if those memories aren’t of unalloyed joy. But the schools that continue to work in hybrid mode or that are returning to remote learning are doing so because BEING FULLY BACK ON CAMPUS ISN’T SAFE, PEOPLE!! Look at the numbers. Watch the news. People are dying of COVID-19, and there are signs that the worst may still lie ahead, no matter how tired parents and other caregivers may be of having kids at home, no matter how much the kids miss their friends, and no matter how much teachers are worrying about what they’re not accomplishing relative to past years.
That schools can safely return to full occupancy and “normal” programming any more quickly than they already are is just magical thinking. Let’s put aside the magic and focus on maintaining communities in which public health guidance is heeded, in which everyone happily lines up for their vaccines when they become available, and in which we stop pretending that there is anything but good to come of measures that keep students, teachers, and all their families alive and well. In the meantime, everyone, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN, and you can ask any child and any teacher for confirmation of this fact. A hundred million little educational miracles are happening every day in school, no matter what “school” looks like.
And while we’re at it, EdWeek, why is making the affirmative decision to keep people safe a “retreat” in the way your headline implies?