Our Children Need Us to Bring the Pandemic Under Control: Only Then Can Public Schools Fully Reopen
This blog will take a one week break. Look for a new post on Monday, August 3.
Widespread disarray as schools struggle to figure out how to reopen is a catastrophe we have permitted to occur this summer as we all watched. Most of us failed to pay enough attention. On some level, I have begun to worry that, in the midst of all the current partisan political upheaval and the stress of the pandemic, America has forgotten to care enough about our children.
State budgets, which are a primary funder of U.S. public education, collapsed last spring due to a COVID-19 recession. On May 15, to shore up state budgets and public education, the U.S. House passed the HEROES Act, but the U.S. Senate is only now taking up the bill. President Donald Trump has denied the seriousness of the pandemic and failed to coordinate a plan to bring infection levels under control. School leaders have been left scrambling just weeks before school is supposed to start. Will students be in school full time, or will they learn online as they did last spring, or will schools be forced to create hybrid in-person/online schedules to ensure social distancing in classrooms and on school buses?
Do we in America value our children? Do we need a reminder of the vision the American philosopher John Dewey described in 1899: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.” (The School and Society, p. 1)
Suddenly in the past couple of weeks, the reopening of public schools this fall has become a CONTINUE READING: Our Children Need Us to Bring the Pandemic Under Control: Only Then Can Public Schools Fully Reopen | janresseger