Originally published Aug 13, 2020.
Do we have to?
I saw this tweet about school re-openings and it made my gut wrench. Imagine sending my little ones somewhere where they’re surrounded by the new anxiety.
While schools from the U.S. to Israel and now New Zealand catching outbreaks and closing down, we’re discussing re-opening schools in Toronto with a complete disregard for reality.
After 6 months of conditioning our kids to social distance:
class sizes are 22-30 students
be with students but forced to “distance”
wear masks all day, indoors
sit behind glass walls / separators
feverishly wash hands under the watch of admin
live paranoid inside of a school environment
This isn’t a learning environment and I’m not sending my kids into this anxiety. And if there is an outbreak, we shock the kids back to square one, like CampTO.
It’s not even as creative as the High Park outdoor schools during the 1913 spanish influenza.
Source, Wikipedia: High Park Forest School
Is it naive to look to a Ford government?
It took COVID and the Canadian 🇨🇦 government’s implementation of CERB & CEWS to force an entire country to shift the way things work.
While the systems aren’t perfect, with a snap of a finger, our entire model of living changed. We’ve had 6 months to adapt, and ideas like CERB + working from home became a reality. Some are hopeful for UBI.
Imagine that– we change the way everything else works, but our Government is okay with sending our children, their teachers, and support staff, en masse– into closed spaces for extended periods of time. 🤷🏻♀️
Re-openings are motivated by getting working-class parents back into a broken economic system in-as-much as they are about getting kids back to school–that’s this governments’ bottom line.
Why aren't we re-thinking education?
Maybe it’s because we haven’t been forced to re-think it yet. A lot of us probably band-aided a solution at home– with some online education, mixed in with reading, outdoor play, video games, and cartoons.
We haven’t thought about a 1-3 year solution. Maybe the government will figure it out, or maybe teachers will strike.
Maybe parents will send their kids to school en-masse, maybe everything goes great, or maybe some schools close down. Maybe some kid(s) get sick. Maybe an adult or a child dies God forbid.
I don’t want to live in the ‘maybe’.
We’re following rules created on-the-fly by people that aren’t like us in any way and who don’t have our best interests at heart.
We’re sending our kids back into a broken system, where kids of immigrants, indigenous, and black kids don’t have a great experience to begin with.
We’re sending our kids back into a system that historically undercuts teachers (they were striking).
We’re doing this because Doug Ford and Stephen Lecce think it’s safe to re-open.
Things I'm thinking about...
I think it’s poor form to be reactive.
we can re-construct the education model for our kids.
I believe in community driven public education.
I don’t want my kids to return to ‘normal’ education.
I want them to live outside the box, literally.
I want them to have enriched social learning.
Every now and then, things like a Global Pandemic happen to force us to re-think the way we (1) think, (2) work and (3) live.
So-far I have a handle on 1 and 2. I feel re-thinking our kids education is a big part of figuring out (3): how and why we live.
Comments below.