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I’ve not seen people saying ‘bring it on’, though I do think education and schooling are being confused here in ways that are problematic.
In fact I think both parts of this statement are flawed. https://twitter.com/davies_will/status/1343651077590298626
In fact I think both parts of this statement are flawed. https://twitter.com/davies_will/status/1343651077590298626
Teachers and lecturers, and education workers more generally, often work AGAINST the system to deliver education.
This isn’t controversial, or shouldn’t be, it’s been a truism of the sociology of education for decades, not to mention radical educational thought before that.
This isn’t controversial, or shouldn’t be, it’s been a truism of the sociology of education for decades, not to mention radical educational thought before that.
Right now people are dying. Teachers and educators generally, not to mention pupils and students, are being put at serious risk, and more broadly education settings are jeopardising public health beyond their walls.
A friend and former colleague, a secondary school teacher, has just got out of hospital after a horrendous time with COVID. He was most likely infected in work.
Schools were a priority for this government for two reasons, neither which were to do with education.
Schools were a priority for this government for two reasons, neither which were to do with education.
One, as @VikCR86 has stated, was purely to enable parents to go to work. School reopening paralleled the government’s campaign to get people back into offices, and followed Eat Out to Help Out.
The second is to do with normalisation. The government has persistently, as @Prolapsarian stated earlier, had to be dragged into doing anything in terms of public health. From earliest PM statements of ‘letting it blow through the population’, they have been wilfully dilatory.
There has been a desperation to normalise mass death and high levels of infection. Schools being open is a facet of ‘normal’ life, as is - to take a more trivial example flagged at a recent No 10 press conference - sport.
Kids go to school. Football is on. That’s ‘normal’.
Kids go to school. Football is on. That’s ‘normal’.
The public health case to close schools was overwhelming even before the discussions of recent days. Yet the Labour Party, whatever I think of it, has left the NEU out on a limb. The Labour leadership wants to set traps for Johnson so is playing politics.
It also doesn’t want to be seen as soft on the unions or in ‘hock’ to them. So they will up the rhetorical ante, and then try to make political capital when Johnson ultimately has no choice but to close them.
No-one serious that I am aware of has been wildly enthusiastic about closing schools, so this reads like a strawman to me, and that jars because I respect @davies_will and draw on his work extensively.
But I am not sure that framing closing schools as a ‘social and psychological disaster’ is helpful, or based on evidence. It’s not something which would be done in a vaccuum. If it were done, it would be done simply to forestall the consequences of not doing it.
There will without question be socially and psychologically disastrous consequences if the NHS collapses and the fatality rate rises sharply as a consequence. The long-term implications of another school closure are more complex and ambiguous.
That’s not to say they should be dismissed either. There will be consequences. Of that there is no doubt, and we cannot fully know what they might be.
But I am struggling to recognise the dichotomy being held up here as a real one.
But I am struggling to recognise the dichotomy being held up here as a real one.
