I keep seeing people arguing that school isn’t important, but also against things like school choice and I really wonder what’s motivating them.
But no real danger is easily verified by the stats. Mortality in kids and young adults is a very small percentage.
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Asymptomatic spread and a lack of clarity on whether it was even "airborne" plagued our early efforts to contain it.
That being said, the lockdown-related learning loss is also a disaster, and one that will disproportionately impact disadvantaged kids and their communities.
I'm not sure what we could have done once the virus entered wild mammal populations and began circulating in places with no public health infrastructure. This happened pretty early on. The Omicron variants came out of mice populations in South Africa.
But I'm not sure why the direction of spread would be one way though, that's highly unusual.
> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
> Findings from several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 transmission among students is relatively rare, particularly when prevention strategies are in place. An Australian study of 39 COVID-19 cases among 32 students and seven staff traced contacts across 28 schools and six early childhood centers and found only 33 secondary positive cases (28 students and five staff members) out of 3,439 close child contacts and 385 close staff contacts.58, 59 Several contact tracing studies have found limited student-to-student transmission in schools.47, 54, 60, 61
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
To date only about 1200 people 18 and under have died from/with COVID, and those numbers were far lower before the B variants.
A study about Australian schooling and children probably doesn't hold as much here in the US. My family involves lots of teachers. The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.
>The numbers they came up with do not even remotely track with what they saw in their own schools.
What the research suggests is that you're probably seeing kids under 12 getting COVID from adults.
You can poke around google scholar and see for yourself. Public health articles are quite readable.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7311007/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S018844092...
[3] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ppul.25344
Are you suggesting that children can't learn these skills from adults, but must learn them from other children for some reason?
It is well established that normal development REQUIRES contact with other children. Any specialist in early childhood development or education will tell you this. I'm in no way an expert here, but I've never once seen an expert claim that adult contact substitutes for peer contact in developing these skills.
I suspect that the truth is that children need play and interaction to build social skills but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant. The challenge in the pandemic of course is that the parents did not really have capacity to engage in those activities due to their own jobs and Video Conferencing is a very poor substitute. But suggesting that it has to be other children is probably incorrect. It's just a hypothesis on my part though.
I think you're probably underestimating how much you learned this from each other.
> but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant.
Again, this very much runs contrary to the general consensus about childhood development. If you disagree, then you need to bring some facts and research to the argument.
In fact a cursory survey of the research I can publicly get access to indicates that parent-child, or teacher-child interactions are considered very essential for moral and social development and there is very little mention that I can find of inter-child interactions as a critical part. Most of the research that I can find highlights the importance of adult-child interactions. If you can point me to some studies that counteract that I'm interested.
Contra studies on the importance of inter-child interactions: * https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2187-3_...
* https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Child-care-and-childre...
Study indicating that most of the assessment instruments supporting inter-child interactions and their importance is flawed: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001440298305000310
I admit I smell a little bullshit on this as there are a number of red flags here.
What constitutes "normal" is a subjective judgment relative to a culture. More culture-neutral professions use metrics like "health" in medicine, which are far less loaded, ie. if a particular environment leads to self-destructive behaviours, that's an "unhealthy" environment; but there is notion of a "normal" environment or a "normal" lifestyle. Since you seem fairly adamant that this sort of socializing is crucial, you will have to clarify if you meant "healthy development" rather than "normal development", because the former may be of interest but the latter is of no particular interest.
Furthermore, specialists in early childhood development and education would of course be chock full of good advice, but that advice is based on evidence that was also almost certainly studied within a specific cultural context. I'm not at all convinced that such advice constitutes general principles on how any healthy children must be raised.
If you have citations I'd certainly like to read them.
> a specific cultural context
This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.
If you insist that I have to provide citations to convince you of the consensus here are a few. Vocabulary[2]. An article specifically about the effects of school closures[3]. I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?
[1]https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002456.htm
[2]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.17...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
Yes, milestones for western cultures.
> This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.
Cultural context has little bearing on brain development or language acquisition? Sorry, that's crazy talk. I was raised in a bilingual household, so by any quantitative metric I had twice the language acquisition of all of my peers when entering school, and my nieces and nephews are actually trilingual. Culture has a huge influence on milestones.
"Brain development" is too vague a term to meaningful respond to. Also, "childhood play" doesn't mean "play only among children" it means "play with children". Adults can easily play with children. I do it all of the time.
> I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?
Yes, I have seen literally no reason to conclude that children must interact with other children to grow up healthy. As for your citations:
> [1]https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002456.htm
A review of normal biological maturation of homo sapiens (uncontroversial), sprinkled with a plethora of cultural expectations around maturity needed for schooling and other western expectations which neither hold for other cultures, nor are they some kind of mark of a pinnacle of human growth. I could easily see some of these milestones change in the next 20 years as we better grasp what's happening during human maturation.
> [2]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.17...
Its own synopsis says this is a qualitative study. That's little better than an anecdote to pique curiosity for further study. It proves nothing substantial, and certainly not that this child wouldn't have learned even faster if interacting only with adults, who naturally have an even better grasp of language than children.
> [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
This does not prove your thesis, quite the contrary. Per the abstract, "High school students from low-income neighborhoods suffer a learning loss of 0.4 standard deviations after a one-year school closure, whereas children from high-income neighborhoods initially remain unscathed."
In other words, children that have parents with good jobs (or a parent at home), or other adults that are around to supervise and interact with do just fine, it's only children that are left to their own devices that suffer learning loss. Where is the evidence that peer interaction is critical, which is what you claimed?
There is no evidence that the "great equalization" effect of school has to do with peer interaction at all, it's equally compatible with the hypothesis that poorer kids do better in a more supervised environment where they have to act within certain boundaries enforced by adults, which they otherwise wouldn't have with parents that are abusive, neglectful or have to work too much to put food on the table.
There's also considerable evidence that after school programs reduce crime because they spend less unsupervised time with peers, which reduces delinquent behaviour. In other words, the more time children spend with responsible adults the better off they tend to be, and the more unsupervised time they spend with peers, the more delinquent they tend to be.
So in conclusion, I see no strong, causal connection between peer interaction and healthy development. Positive human interactions matter of course (preferably diverse), but not necessarily peer interactions, which is what you are claiming.
You aren’t pointing to any evidence that peer socialization isn’t really important.
Absent any evidence I have no reason to accept your assertion that children "require" such interactions, particularly since it makes no sense to me. As I said, positive human interactions are clearly essential as the negative effects of isolation are dramatic, but I see no reason why peer interactions specifically are essential and there's no comparably clear, strong signal as with isolation.
> They are basically a tunnel for spreading from one family to another
This wasn't and generally hasn't been the case for children under 12 as the aforementioned research points out. Spread generally goes from adults to each-other and to children and rarely in the other direction. It was a very poor rationale for closing schools, especially elementary schools. These kids have missed out on critical milestones in social and psychological development that far outweigh any known risk they face from COVID.
One of the worst things that happened the last two years is this myopic focus on exactly one thing with zero regard to other competing problems. Everything has costs. Keeping kids out of school for a year plus has costs. I am fairly certain history will show that the costs to children vastly outweigh the marginal benefits gained from closing schools to "reduce the spread".
It turns out there are other problems in the world than just a myopic fixation to covid... the inability for "the experts" to balance covid against the rest of human existence is one of the greatest fuckups of our time.
Even in other OECD nations, they kept kids in school and mostly unmasked to facilitate learning.
- Italy [0] - Germany [1] - Ireland [2] - Spain [3]
I could go on and on but everyone who managed to travel globally during 2021 knows this is completely untrue.
[0] https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/italy-unveils-covid-green-...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-angela-merkel-coronavir...
[2] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/movie-review/movie-review-...
[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/21/spai-j21.html
If you don't think the default school is important, why would you care if a kid switched?
--
If the response was that it's too expensive to allow them to switch that'd be logical, but I don't think that's the common response. Tbf I am not really aware of people matching the initial premise either.
Edit: formatting
My understanding of school choice is that there is little to no difference in the overall money spent. It is just that it is assigned to each student.
If the student population were then to remain in the same schools, nothing changes. It is only when students move to other schools and take the money with them that there is a change.
ok, I would expect some significant change in investment because of needs of bureaucracy, IT systems etc.
I mean if kids go by default to school they should go to, then there has to be a process for kids that want to change, there has to be a way to register and keep that knowledge of change through the next sequence of that child's schooling etc.
I would expect it to cost something noticeable, and that it might also cost more or less depending on which part of the U.S. one were in.
The processes and tools to support this are already in place, we're only talking about scale.
There certainly would be a significant amount of disruption over the first five or so years as kids move around, schools would need to figure out expansion/contraction of facilities and faculties.
>I keep seeing people arguing that school isn’t important, but also against things like school choice and I really wonder what’s motivating them.
so what did I say, I said >If you think school isn't important why would you want to spend the extra money on school choice that such a program would entail?
for which I got three downvotes, because reasons I guess.
someone said it wouldn't be expensive, I said ok it seems to me like logically it would but I could be wrong, here are my points why I think it would be expensive. The guy above the post of mine you're replying to said it wouldn't be expensive for any of those reasons but there would be a lot of disruptions the first few years, and I said ok, so then a person who thought schools were unimportant wouldn't want you to shift schools for that reason, because who wants to deal with a bunch of disruptions in an unimportant system? (and in my world systems that have lots of disruptions tend to be expensive)
I think the thread should be pretty clear.
> someone said it wouldn't be expensive, I said ok it seems to me like logically it would but I could be wrong
This is information you can easily find. Charter schools for example spend 61% of what public schools do per pupil per year on average in the US.