Could alternative schools offer an answer?

See update for July 31, 2020, at end of post


The Wall Street Journal worries that the failure of schools to reopen due to the COVID-19 pandemic might affect people’s abilities to return to work and the following economic effects are,[1] of course, a large part of the reason that the Trump administration desperately wants schools to reopen.[2] There is a sense as well that kids don’t learn as well through online instruction.[3]

And it might be that younger kids, at least,[4] can safely return to school. The findings are, to say the least, counterintuitive and warrant caution,[5] not the sort of recklessness Donald Trump seems to prefer, particularly as evidence emerges that older kids do in fact transmit the coronavirus like adults.[6]

I need to say here that primary and secondary education are not my thing. I am childfree in part because of my experiences with children while growing up—I was a kid who could never fit in, who was never interested in what other kids were interested in, who was relentlessly teased, who was often physically assaulted, and who never found support from school administrators. I remember roaming the halls of my high school desperate for a place to hide.

I don’t like kids. So whatever the answer is, I am unlikely to be a participant.

That said, when I was in the Ph.D. program that was the wrong program for me,[7] at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), I had a number of really cool fellow students, some of whom were educators at that level.

Another of my misgivings about primary and secondary education is that it is compulsory, a point reinforced when one day, I was a substitute teacher at a middle school in Rohnert Park, California. Faculty there are all issued walkie talkies. As I carried mine around, and saw the kids behind high fences, I thought to myself that this resembled prison. The guard towers were missing, but students would line up at the door as class was scheduled to end, waiting for the bell to ring—they did not dare to leave the room until it had.

One of my fellow students at CIIS was emphatic on this point: She said to bring her a student who is ready to learn something and that she could teach them that something better in a fraction of the time. A number of these educators taught at alternative schools similar to, I gather, Waldorf.

The idea seems to be to let students follow their own meandering path through what they ultimately need to learn.

I don’t know how well this works, really. I don’t know that all students will cover all the bases they need to cover, including the bases I personally consider important. But I guess it works well enough that these schools meet state educational requirements and I do know that we in fact know relatively little about how education works, that much pedagogical theory is grounded more in anecdote than in replicated experiments.

And I also know that students learn when and what they want to learn and pretty much forget the rest just as soon as they’ve passed the test. Paulo Freire derided what he called “bank deposit” education[8] and I’m pretty sure he was right.

So here we are with a situation where, because it still might turn out that at least some kids might transmit the novel coronavirus[9] and schools are accordingly hesitant to reopen,[10] and parents need to be able to work, we need a rethink of how education happens in order to ensure that kids get a quality education, something, by the way, that in the present system seems often only available to kids in wealthier districts.[11]

I’d be looking at those alternative schools for at least part of the answer.


Update, July 31, 2020: I said above, and indeed the Pediatrics article I cited[12] said, to treat findings suggesting that children can’t transmit the novel coronavirus with caution. More recent research strongly suggests that caution is warranted, that children do carry the virus in a way that would allow them to transmit it to others.[13]

  1. [1]Justin Lahart, “Kids at Home Could Put the Economy in Detention,” Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/kids-at-home-could-put-the-economy-in-detention-11595583001
  2. [2]Laura Meckler, “With pressure and threats, Trump pushes to fully reopen schools. Schools say: Not so fast,” Washington Post, July 8, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/trump-schools-cdc-pence/2020/07/08/8a52d400-c14b-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html
  3. [3]Justin Lahart, “Kids at Home Could Put the Economy in Detention,” Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/kids-at-home-could-put-the-economy-in-detention-11595583001
  4. [4]Peter Dockrill, “Older Kids May Transmit COVID-19 as Much as Adults Do, New Evidence Shows,” Science Alert, July 20, 2020, https://www.sciencealert.com/older-children-transmit-covid-19-as-much-as-adults-do-new-evidence-suggests
  5. [5]Benjamin Lee and William V. Raszka, “COVID-19 Transmission and Children: The Child Is Not to Blame,” Pediatrics 146, no. 1 (2020), doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-004879
  6. [6]Peter Dockrill, “Older Kids May Transmit COVID-19 as Much as Adults Do, New Evidence Shows,” Science Alert, July 20, 2020, https://www.sciencealert.com/older-children-transmit-covid-19-as-much-as-adults-do-new-evidence-suggests
  7. [7]This was Transformative Studies. I ultimately completed a Ph.D. in Human Science at Saybrook University.
  8. [8]Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2006).
  9. [9]Peter Dockrill, “Older Kids May Transmit COVID-19 as Much as Adults Do, New Evidence Shows,” Science Alert, July 20, 2020, https://www.sciencealert.com/older-children-transmit-covid-19-as-much-as-adults-do-new-evidence-suggests
  10. [10]Laura Meckler, “With pressure and threats, Trump pushes to fully reopen schools. Schools say: Not so fast,” Washington Post, July 8, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/trump-schools-cdc-pence/2020/07/08/8a52d400-c14b-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html
  11. [11]Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
  12. [12]Benjamin Lee and William V. Raszka, “COVID-19 Transmission and Children: The Child Is Not to Blame,” Pediatrics 146, no. 1 (2020), doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-004879
  13. [13]Apoorva Mandavilli, “Children May Carry Coronavirus at High Levels, Study Finds,” New York Times, July 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/health/coronavirus-children.html

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