\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPublic classroom/daytime childcare.
I told everyone I knew that they should homeschool this year, as their kid(s) was going to end up at home with them teaching anyways, so they might as well do it in a coherent fashion that they like.
But, I\u2019ve been trying to hire for all shifts lately, and it is HARD to hire first shift right now, because everyone, even unmarried childless 20-something men have surprise! childcare responsibilities because daycare and school effectively don\u2019t exist right now, so families are having to share childcare shifts between them, including to the 20-something uncle, and so second shift is currently the most desirable shift for my hiring pool.
I figured that we were going to see a permanent increase in homeschooling from this, as some families have discovered that it works well for them, but the complete collapse of teacher morale and the apparent departure from the industry by a substantial number, not to mention the presumable complete lack of mandatory classroom hours for education majors is presumably causing issues with the entry side of the labor pipeline.
I\u2019m hearing from parents that they\u2019re supposed to sit and make their THREE YEAR OLD do Skype class for several hours AFTER they did several hours being rubbed against one another in the classroom. It\u2019s obviously ridiculous, purely for the purpose of training the child to learn online, and obviously not educational, also obviously not preventing exposure to Covid.
Parents collectively are getting to see what their children are really being taught, and how they\u2019re being treated, leading to a parade of news articles about parents horrified to learn that crying in the classroom is apparently considered normal, that flatly inaccurate information about their ethnicity is being taught, and so on. You\u2019ll get different versions in different news sources, but the overall tenor is the same; parents aren\u2019t liking what they\u2019re seeing of teachers or curriculum, and teachers aren\u2019t liking being observed so closely by parents.
Meanwhile, the school-to-prison industrial complex grind continues, so now we have a child\u2019s home and personal room being Literally policed and such crimes as \u201cnot doing homework\u201d, \u201cplaying with a toy gun at home\u201d and \u201chaving a flag in your own room\u201d criminalized.
We might be focused on more immediate issues right now but the fact that basically overnight American universal public classroom education systems collapsed, replaced by an \u201cinterim\u201d class-tiered in-home tutoring/online schooling/basically nothing system that grows deeper roots by the day, is going to be immensely important to where like, society goes from here.
And I honestly doubt that cheaper, more controlling forms of schooling that offloads costs onto parents and allows for teachers to be full out offshored while reducing or eliminating infrastructure costs is going to be put back into pandora\u2019s box.
University is not about education. It\u2019s a status marker, it\u2019s Rumspringa, it\u2019s getting your MRS degree.
K-12 will probably go back to normal at some point because it\u2019s not about status, but something actually useful.
Parents collectively are getting to see what their children are really \nbeing taught, and how they\u2019re being treated, leading to a parade of news\n articles about parents horrified to learn that crying in the classroom \nis apparently considered normal, that flatly inaccurate information \nabout their ethnicity is being taught, and so on. You\u2019ll get different \nversions in different news sources, but the overall tenor is the same; \nparents aren\u2019t liking what they\u2019re seeing of teachers or curriculum, and\n teachers aren\u2019t liking being observed so closely by parents.
I have seen multiple stories like this from America and none from here. I have seen stories of parents upset by what their children are taught, or stories of teachers teaching blatantly wrong ideas because it doesn\u2019t matter whether or not it\u2019s true, it\u2019s the lesson plan, and we\u2019re teaching to the standardised test.
But what I haven\u2019t seen is stories by parents who are utterly surprised by what their children are doing in school, only learning what\u2019s going on now they are listening in on video calls.
And it got me thinking: Do these people not talk to their children? Do these children just not find it worth mentioning because they are children and never knew any different? Or is the whole thing just going through the news now because Zoom and COVID are an angle, and this whole thing has been going on forever, but was never relevant enough to report on?
it\u2019s a little bit of\u00a0\u201cnever relevant\u201d and so parents listening in is now a different angle they can spin as opposed to\u00a0\u201cparents meddling in the classroom\u201d which always feels like activism. this can, and is, shown as fly on the wall, a real look, rather than as parents making wild claims and people calling them wild political claims regardless of the facts.
and yes, it\u2019s also that parents never talk to their kids, don\u2019t care or believe what the kids have to say, and also that the kids are kids and so don\u2019t know that they\u2019re being taught lies or being mistreated. combine that last with how standard culture hates children, the don\u2019t care/don\u2019t believe, and you get stuff like this. likely lots of kids are getting the same treatment, but their parents also don\u2019t care. you won\u2019t see any of this coming out of conservative areas unless it\u2019s outrage about teaching science or how kids can\u2019t show christian icons in their rooms. it will never be about treating kids harshly in those places.
I don\u2019t know if I told the story about my father refusing to sign off on a test I \u201cfailed\u201c, when actually the test was wrong. My father refused to sign off on it and wrote something along the lines of \u201cplease look this up in a source more recent than Aristotle\u201c instead. I knew I\u2019d be in trouble for defying my teacher, but my father was 100% right and had my back. Although I had written something different from what our teacher had told us, it turned out a third version was the actual truth, and she had taught complete bullshit.
Anyway: My dad talked to me, and took interest in my homework, and many teachers are actual idiots who can\u2019t be fired for incompetence (teaching things wrong) as long as they don\u2019t abuse the children (verbally or otherwise).
Here\u2019s another story: Our teacher asked us: \u201cWhich way would the scale tip?\u201d about a drawing with a scale where one side said \u201c5kg of feathers\u201d and the other had a weight that said \u201c5kg lead\u201c. I asked my teacher whether the scale was in a vaccum. She said obviously not. So I (8 years old) replied that under our atmosphere, the scale would tip towards the lead, because of the buoyancy of the feathers. My teacher really hated me, because not only did she practise \u201clie-to-children\u201d (in the Terry Pratchett sense, not the Fox News sense), but she believed her own lies.
(In case you\u2019re an angry primary school teacher about to \u201ccorrect\u201d me, here\u2019s an intuition pump for you: Imagine a balloon filled with 5kg of helium, or just hot air)
At the time, I thought I was smarter than most adults (except for my parents), because most adults I interacted with were very, very dumb schoolteachers. The reason for all this is not just that society at large is indifferent to children, but also that, over time, teachers start to think in terms of the oversimplifications they use, until they believe that the world really is as simple as the world they teach.
It\u2019s scary that Americans took so long to find this out, or maybe Terry Pratchett version of \u201clie-to-children\u201c in the USA is inextricably tainted by the Fox News version of the concept.
I\u2019m fairly sure that school teachers are, on average, not particularly smart. It was public information that the teaching major at my school had the lowest incoming test scores, and this was at a college where half of the freshmen were in remedial math, English, or both, and I\u2019m not a math person but the remedial math was stuff I did in 5th grade. It was pretty explicit that the major was the replacement for home ec and The Mrs degree too.
I\u2019m under the impression that this is fairly representative of the teaching profession as a whole; gender normy women who want to exercise petty control over other people and have reliable employment but are too stupid and lazy to go into nursing.
Teaching as a profession attracts a few types of people, but the sort who were attracted by both a love of children and a love of teaching (and who don\u2019t burn out in the first two years) are being phased out since modern teaching in public schools involves a whole lot more reading from a script than it does actually teaching. The next group, of people was women who wanted a career in a society that basically only allowed women to be teachers or nurses; again, mostly phased out. A related group it people who perhaps weren\u2019t enthusiastic about teaching kids as such, but recognize that they are good at it and it was where their skills were best put to use: the ones who don\u2019t burn out end up realizing they can make more money per hour at jobs that don\u2019t make full use of their skills, but are far less stressful.
Naturally, it remains attractive to authoritarian types who know that they could only ever get kids to obey them, to the people who couldn\u2019t get a professional-type job anywhere else, and to people who just love kids even if they maybe aren\u2019t the best at teaching.
It does seem to be the case that an education major is one of the easiest degrees to earn, which is probably a mixture of self-fulfilling prophecy and because if it were harder the teacher shortage would be even worse than it currently is.
None of this, of course, is inherent to the profession. The public school I went to was largely staffed by people who either loved kids and were enthusiastic about teaching or for whom teaching was legitimately their best skill and the place it made the most sense for them to work (I graduated high school in the late naughties). I\u2019m one of a tiny number of people I know for whom middle school was a positive experience.
I think isaacsapphire is right that we\u2019re going to see a continued transition to homeschooling, which for a variety of reasons I think is probably on average a bad thing, although it\u2019s possible that as more people homeschool the field will get better regulated and have better coursework available than it currently does (one of the main reasons I\u2019m generally anti-homeschooling is that it\u2019s a massively easy way to cover up child abuse/neglect and the other is that any random textbook for homeschooling was probably written by Christian fundamentalists).
With a college degree, schoolteachers used to be some of the most educated members of a community, and states set up “normal schools” to educate and grant them those degrees. Where normal schools still exist they typically represent a second tier of public college like California’s CSU system; above local two year community colleges but below the flagship state university (including its satellite campuses), taking students who are capable of four-year education but not otherwise distinguished.
In retrospect I grew up in the “favored quarter” suburbs of Philly, the school district was a driver of the growth economy and had its pick of teachers, I probably have a tilted take from that. (I remember later in college a discrepancy going from Cornell, where even a [full professor’s] large first-year lectures would have 15-person grad student-led sections to visiting my friend at Penn State main campus where he had introductory lectures by seniors.)
"}