It's not over, but it's not like it was. The Covid-19 pandemic will be that annoying watershed moment we babble about to our children’s children years from now, when, because of the climate catastrophe, we’re huddled around a burning spare tire for warmth, feasting on roasted squirrel. “You think dealing with Lord Humungous is bad, kid? Let me tell you about the toilet paper crisis of 2020.”
Now, in the fall of 2021, there's room for cautious optimism. I mean, I guess there is? Three-fourths of the population has had at least one dose of the vaccine, transmission is down, and while we're currently at just over 1 million deaths from the virus, the number has been decreasing. Sort of.
But if the pandemic is not-over-but-over, the education and culture wars of late are never-over-even-worse now. That's all a hangover that won't abate soon. I kept a clip file of news coverage that played the "On the one hand, science; on the other hand, nah" card, and I wound up burning it in a fire pit and consuming the ashes.
A "return to normal," even if fleeting, sounds great. But let's not forget how crappy that normal was before, and how much worse it is today.
After two years of pleading with kids to turn on their cameras during Zoom meets, after two years of futilely trying to get pupils to wear a piece of cloth across their face so they don’t, like, spread a disease that could kill someone, it looks more like pre-2020 than ever before in the halls of higher learning. So do the headlines.
NAEP scores are out, and they’re not good! Math and reading scores are down (two decades lost! the New York Times proclaimed), and the kids are not alright!
Remote school? Remote school is what did this! Those damn teachers unions made onerous demands for school safety, and the nation’s kids suffered as a result.
Or else it was the blue state governors who should’ve grown a pair and opened the schools in the face of all scientific evidence to the contrary! And by the way, Democrats should have stopped trying to pin the spread of Covid on Trump, which is why so many parents wound up not sending their kids to school in person!
And the teachers? The ones tasked with managing all of this?
Well, they’re not doing too well right now, but who cares?
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the nation’s esteem of its educators, never very high to begin with, plummeted to an all-new low. Staffing shortages persist in many high needs districts. Teachers are getting harassed over library books and rainbow flags. Teachers are quitting. Teachers are expressing regret over having become teachers. Fewer college students are planning on becoming teachers than ever before.
Can we blame them?
Let’s make sure we take accurate stock of the situation. Two years ago, there was a brief, glorious moment right before the country shut down where educators and the public were almost in sync with each other. We were going to make remote learning work—it was only going to be for a few weeks, right? We pulled all nighters making videos, retooling lesson plans for Zoom meetings and Google Forms. We were told we’d be covered, supported. We were told we were heroes.
Then came the newest iteration of the assault on public education. No, it turned out, we weren’t practicing best preventive measures to keep the virus from spreading—we were sheeple, indoctrinating our children and fostering a sense of panic and partisanship.
No, we weren’t teaching sex ed or acknowledging the existence of the LGBTQ community—we were “grooming” our students. What we were grooming them for tended to depend on whom you were talking about, but the objective was always sinister and perverted.
U.S. history? You thought you were teaching that? No, you were covering critical race theory and teaching our students to hate America. Asshole.
School board meetings turned into Thunderdome battles, residents waving talking points straight from organizations like Citizens Renewing America, yelling about copies of Maus and The Diary of Anne Frank being forced upon their progeny. Libraries and departments were assaulted with Freedom of Information Acts, sent by citizens demanding to know whether Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 project were required reading and whether they were balanced with enlightened perspectives like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
And suddenly, school shootings were back. Teachers collectively slapped their foreheads and remarked, “Oh yeah, I live in the United States. I forgot about those.”
We sat through Power Points on how to put on a tourniquet if a student were to be bleeding to death, and just like that, “normal” was normal again. We were implored to be Hero Teachers. I invested forty dollars in Raid spray to keep beneath my desk, then went home, ate a pint of ice cream and screamed into my closet.
Anyone with a memory that stretches longer than thirty minutes has to chuckle at the newfound outrage over the race- and income-based achievement gap. For years, we were told it was because we weren't teaching those students properly. Then the schools shut down, the pandemic wreaked its havoc, and now we're told the gap is worse because those vulnerable students weren't in the classroom with us, learning. Concern about our health and a rising tide of Covid-related fatalities was just a smoke screen. We just wanted to stay home and work in our jammies.
(Incidentally, the corporate world is currently working extra hard to lure their own employees off the couch and back into the office with perks like Take your Dog to Work Day and other goodies teachers in this country will never, ever know.)
Now those very same voices, previously happy to defund classrooms and privatize the profession, are yelling about all this “learning loss” America’s students have suffered. And yes, students have suffered. Remote learning was a bitch. No one questions that. Teachers do take issue with the notion that one month of math lessons can be made up in two weeks at accelerated speed, or that externalities like sickness, parental job loss, and the economic mayhem plaguing us all doesn’t also do a number on Junior’s memorization of the times tables. No teacher in the country claimed remote learning was an adequate replacement for in-person instruction. But we were of the opinion that if the country acknowledged the threat of the virus, got its vaccines, masked up and took all necessary precautions, remote learning would last a hell of a lot shorter than it needed to. Unfortunately, the United States has always equated science as “just another point of view,” which was why I spent the better part of 2021 patiently explaining to seventeen-year-olds that a mask that doesn’t cover both nose and mouth is not going to stop the spread of the virus. Because you breathe through your nose too, don’t you see.
One rather maddening effect of the renewed assault on our nation's schools, which is rapidly become clearer every day that passes this fall, is that corporate and right wing America has decided it does need schools after all, but not for learning. “When schools shuttered, they stopped performing their sole undeniably valuable function: providing day care,” wrote economics professor Bryan Caplan in a recent New York Times essay. “In-person schooling allows parents to work full-time without distraction. In-person schooling allows parents to take care of infants and elders. In-person schooling allows parents to finish their household chores. And in-person schooling allows parents to relax.”
Leave to to economists to reduce the backbone of American democracy to an institutional babysitting service. The Economist, in a piece bemoaning long summer breaks for Western pupils, wagged a finger at educators the world over at thinking a little too highly of their job description. “The more time children spend in school, the easier things are for busy parents: that history class is also a form of child care, no matter how much teachers resent that thought,” they lectured. “The progressive prescription du jour is across-the-board reductions in class sizes,” sneered the New York Daily News Editorial Board. “The far smarter course is to deliver much more learning time, in the form of longer school days and years.”
This sentiment is an old tune. In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith professed disdain for government-funded schools, whether university-level or otherwise, even if they had plenty of money. “In some of the richest and best endowed universities, the tutors content themselves with teaching a few unconnected shreds and parcels of this corrupted course; and even these they commonly teach very negligently and superficially,” he wrote.
However, he immediately admitted afterwards, “No better method…could be fallen upon of spending, with any advantage, the long interval between infancy and that period of life at which men begin to apply in good earnest to the real business of the world.”
This is the line at which P.J. O’Rourke cracked wise once: We can’t think of what else to do with the little bastards all day, so you guys take care of them so their parents can earn money. (I paraphrase.)
And that’s the sentiment, always present but now creeping slowly and steadily into outright policy. Just keep them in school long enough for them to graduate, and they’ll then have to sink into unheard of amounts of debt to find a college-level job. Which means more dough for the banks and loan companies, which means further academic inflation, which means a saturated job market which means employers can rule the roost and continue to make record profits, etc. etc etc.
Never in my two-plus decades on the job has morale been this bad. Never have I felt so marginalized. I do not and never have claimed to deserve Educator of the Year, but I know plenty of teachers who deserve support and resources necessary to navigate the nation’s youth through these tumultuous times. But they’re not getting it. To listen to the political class talk about our job, you’d think our duties consist of cramming the three R’s into students’ heads, just simply passing down the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of whatever canon we’re dribbling between our legs at any given moment. It’s way more than that, as any educator could tell them. Only we’re not asked.
(It’s not as galling as politicians regulating birth control when they don’t even know how a woman's body works, I grant you, but it’s still pretty galling.)
So what do we do? Hell if I know. The problem with diatribes like this is they’re likely to be read mostly by people who already agree with them. There are a million things the schools need now, but if I had to pick one in particular, right this second, I’d have to go with “Stop letting people who know nothing about education set education policy.” I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis. And I’m looking at you, Rick Scott.
Another thing we sorely need is a robust, informed discussion of what education is actually for. Not likely to happen, though. The Washington Post recently reported a decline in interest in humanities majors, and pointed to that as evidence of some kind of buyer’s remorse, since the history of thought and the practice of dialectical thinking and critical reading, while the backbone of democracy itself, doesn’t make as much cheddar as the tech industry does. Whatever.
And while we’re indulging in idle fantasy, I’m looking at every single talking head, in print or on TV, who decided to bash educators slogging through remote learning, while they themselves were safely ensconced at home with their laptop and fuzzy slippers. And I’m envisioning substitute teacher jobs for the lot of them.
Well. I can dream.
But seriously, folks, I could go on, but what's the point? The political class and the elites who really run the country have been itching to demolish the nation’s public schools for decades. It’s not hard to see why—there’s a lot of money in it, and it turns out people are easier to control if they can’t think for themselves. And the way things are going now, they’ll get their wish. If they can get educators too terrified to acknowledge basic facts like the reality of climate change, or that Joe Biden won the 2020 election or even the fact that slavery was carried out by white people, then as George Carlin predicted, you’ll wind up with a nation smart enough to work the machinery but too dumb to understand why they can’t afford to get sick or retire before the age of 98. Hell, they said my generation would wind up like that, and sometimes I think they’re right. But here we are, the adults in charge, rocketing into the third decade of the New Millennium, frazzled and unkempt, tiptoeing around reality while yelling about dealing pronouns to children or whatever, wondering if we have enough sick days left over if the virus strikes again.
But I mean, who are we kidding? The UNIPCC report plainly states that we can expect widespread disease as a result of climate change in the coming decades. Covid was just a warm-up. What’s coming will make it look like a mild case of eczema.
Pass the squirrel, Lord Humungus.
