This article is about the other kids. The kindergartners who haven't seen a teacher's face in 24 months. The grade schoolers forced to eat outside in the cold. The high schoolers who unofficially "dropped out" when their schools closed and will never return to receive their diploma. Those kids have suffered greatly in the name of reducing risk to adults.
What is that even supposed to mean?
- The grade schoolers forced to eat outside in the cold.
This is not harmful, but is also not universal. I have not seen that personally. Hell, in Nordic countries people leave their infants outside in freezing temperatures to nap.
- The high schoolers who unofficially "dropped out" when their schools closed and will never return to receive their diploma.
No one cared about high school drop outs before. Why the sudden concern now?
Lots of people cared (and continue to care) about the high school drop out rate. I would be such a person.
College dropouts on the other hand…
2. Speak for yourself. If my young child was forced to eat lunch outside of the cafeteria in freezing temperatures I'd be furious. And infants left outside are bundled up—they're not manipulating food and placing it into their mouths.
3. I tend to care about all people and seek the best outcomes for everyone whenever possible. My bad, I guess.
In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no pressure from their day job.
In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the teacher is setting the day's agenda via a zoom call or two, and the kids have to follow the exercises after. Some of these exercises may not make sense to the parents.
The parents don't get any advance "teachers notes" or inkling of what is coming, the exercises appear and if the kid is stuck you need to figure out how to help them.
In summary pandemic remote schooling is not home schooling for 2 reasons. One is the parents probably have their main job to do. Two is the parents are not teaching, they are at best a teachers assistant who is badly prepped.
Because an enormous amount education is classroom management and behavioral conditioning, neither of which are easy to do remotely.
This is sometimes talked about pejoratively. E.g., "so much of school is just babysitting". It's true in content. But the dismissive tone ignores the reality that for a vast majority of children, learning how to stay on task, especially in a suboptimal environment like a classroom or open office, is much more difficult than learning the actual content of any particular lesson.
In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magnitude harder than with adults, but that doesn't sound good.
Also, the behavioral thing is the thing you need a full-time person for. But parents can't teach full time. So the thin you most need a full-timer for is the thing that's impossible to do remotely! Which was kind of OP's whole point.
> In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magnitude harder than with adults, but that doesn't sound good.
1. There's a lot more structure to it than that. Not to say it works or it's good, but there is more structure. Kids are often required to log into zoom for face time and so on, but it's at best marginally helpful. There's genuinely no way to manage 20+ little boxes on a screen.
2. More importantly, I don't think that is what OP was saying! They were drawing an important distinction between having a full-time homeschooling teacher and relying on a person in a box who's managing 20 other kids in boxes.
Again, if you accept on face that the behavior management side of teaching and the conveying knowledge side of teaching are basically inseparable, then OP's observation is an important one. Homeschooling can work well; remote schooling through zoom, not so much.
Homeschooling by choice has a great academic record with students doing well on standardized exams and in college. Kids who were sent home for “virtual school” on the other hand have a lot of learning loss on average.
Especially when parents still had to work and just put their kid in front of a TV, that’s not home schooling.