Okay, that title is a little bit clickbait-y, but I do think there was one big reason for closing schools during the pandemic that (almost?) no one is talking about.
My wife is a public elementary school teacher in CA and I teach private HS civics and philosophy.
I don't think many serious people are questioning the concept of shutting down schools in a pandemic, but to the extent they are, it's because of one simple action: once we shut them down no one was willing to reopen them.
Our schools both stopped in March of 2020. I went back to teaching 3 months later. Mine is a co-op school and we decided it was clear that 1) COVID wasn't smallpox and 2) COVID didn't affect kids very much. Because we're in CA, we stayed under the radar as much as possible. However, my wife's public school stayed online until September of 2021: a year and a half of teaching 1st grade on Zoom. There was simply no excuse for this.
Remember the adage "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy"? Well a corollary is "no scientific model survives contact with reality." Public health authorities were so wedded to their models they ignored the models' increasing divergence from reality. This isn't unique to them (my own field of economics is famous for it) but the damage caused in this case was both rapid and severe. My kids generation (teenagers during COVID) have zero-faith in public health authorities; if we get a smallpox-level pandemic in the last 25 years, that generation won't listen. And to be honest, I would be pretty skeptical too.
Shutting down schools made sense. So did "2 weeks to slow the spread". The later backlash was caused by public health authorities unwillingness to adapt their policies to the additional data as it came in.
My wife is a public elementary school teacher in CA and I teach private HS civics and philosophy.
I don't think many serious people are questioning the concept of shutting down schools in a pandemic, but to the extent they are, it's because of one simple action: once we shut them down no one was willing to reopen them.
Our schools both stopped in March of 2020. I went back to teaching 3 months later. Mine is a co-op school and we decided it was clear that 1) COVID wasn't smallpox and 2) COVID didn't affect kids very much. Because we're in CA, we stayed under the radar as much as possible. However, my wife's public school stayed online until September of 2021: a year and a half of teaching 1st grade on Zoom. There was simply no excuse for this.
Remember the adage "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy"? Well a corollary is "no scientific model survives contact with reality." Public health authorities were so wedded to their models they ignored the models' increasing divergence from reality. This isn't unique to them (my own field of economics is famous for it) but the damage caused in this case was both rapid and severe. My kids generation (teenagers during COVID) have zero-faith in public health authorities; if we get a smallpox-level pandemic in the last 25 years, that generation won't listen. And to be honest, I would be pretty skeptical too.
Shutting down schools made sense. So did "2 weeks to slow the spread". The later backlash was caused by public health authorities unwillingness to adapt their policies to the additional data as it came in.