Online schooling
Online schooling harms children. It just doesn’t work and shouldn’t be seen as an acceptable way to teach children. They are not learning and it makes them physically and mentally ill. By now a generation of students from Day Care Centres to the Pre Schools and onto Primary School have been damaged. Secondary school students aren’t much better off.
There may still be some who believe in the idealised version of online learning, at home, where middle-class children with devoted parents sit next to them helping them learn, with fast broadband and dedicated laptops per child. This is not the reality for the majority of our children.
One hears nonsense about three and four year olds going to “school” because they are looking at a screen. The idea that they or six and seven and eight year and nine-year-old children can be forced to sit down in front of a screen and learn anything is palpably false.
The idea that insisting that these kids sit down quietly for up to six hours a day, with the occasional break, and that they will do this, could only be believed by people who have forgotten what being a child is like.
Just two years ago we were advising parents not to allow their children to spend more than two hours a day in front of a screen because it damaged their eyes and deadened their minds. In the panic and fear of COVID we forgot that.
Most teachers seem to be teaching online in the same manner they taught in person. It might be possible to do that with one or two children. It is impossible to do that with 30 children online.
The idea that you can expect a teacher to adapt to the new teaching techniques needed for online teaching without adequate training is ludicrous.
And all of this without taking into account availability of computers and the necessity for some children to use the screen of a mobile phone, the issues with connectivity, the difficulties of handing in homework and projects, the problems teachers have in correcting papers and returning them, their own problems supervising their children at “school” etc. All these make the idea of online schooling a farce.
We have forgotten that school is not only about educational attainment.
In-person schooling is about providing children with a safe place, food, books, outdoor play and access to adults trained in teaching and interacting with children.
School closures lead to a loss of play, social interaction and are associated with an increase with domestic abuse, mental health issues, obesity, myopia and a decrease in physical activity.
In the beginning of the epidemic it might have made sense to close schools. There were concerns about the transmissibility of the virus among children, the risk to teachers and security guards and cleaners, the risk to grandparents and vulnerable parents of children contracting COVID-19 at school and bringing it home. s we learned these risks were Aminor and that children mainly caught the virus from adults around them and not vice versa. There is concern about the long term effects of COVID. This last is still valid but the more we learn about the virus the more we realise that its effects on children are minor.
We know now how to reduce the risk of transmission in indoor settings such as schools through good ventilations systems and air-filtration systems.
This can range from opening doors and windows to allow ventilation through classrooms and hallways, to open air classes, to HEPA filters that completely clean the air several times an hour.
Rapid 15 minute at-home antigen testing is a simple, quick way of identifying infectious individual and ensuring they stay our of the school environment until they are past the infectious period.
They should be available free for the children, teachers and anyone working in schools.
Schools should be the last thing to be closed and the first to be opened.
Not cigarette companies and fast food places.
In 2022 instead of closing schools, we need to focus on the protections we now have: vaccination, ventilation, filtration of the air and identifying infectious individuals with rapid home testing.
It’s also time we decide that schools are as essential as hospitals, supermarkets, pharmacies and other institutions that stayed open during the strictest lockdowns.
There may still be some who believe in the idealised version of online learning, at home, where middle-class children with devoted parents sit next to them helping them learn, with fast broadband and dedicated laptops per child. This is not the reality for the majority of our children.
One hears nonsense about three and four year olds going to “school” because they are looking at a screen. The idea that they or six and seven and eight year and nine-year-old children can be forced to sit down in front of a screen and learn anything is palpably false.
The idea that insisting that these kids sit down quietly for up to six hours a day, with the occasional break, and that they will do this, could only be believed by people who have forgotten what being a child is like.
Just two years ago we were advising parents not to allow their children to spend more than two hours a day in front of a screen because it damaged their eyes and deadened their minds. In the panic and fear of COVID we forgot that.
Most teachers seem to be teaching online in the same manner they taught in person. It might be possible to do that with one or two children. It is impossible to do that with 30 children online.
The idea that you can expect a teacher to adapt to the new teaching techniques needed for online teaching without adequate training is ludicrous.
And all of this without taking into account availability of computers and the necessity for some children to use the screen of a mobile phone, the issues with connectivity, the difficulties of handing in homework and projects, the problems teachers have in correcting papers and returning them, their own problems supervising their children at “school” etc. All these make the idea of online schooling a farce.
We have forgotten that school is not only about educational attainment.
In-person schooling is about providing children with a safe place, food, books, outdoor play and access to adults trained in teaching and interacting with children.
School closures lead to a loss of play, social interaction and are associated with an increase with domestic abuse, mental health issues, obesity, myopia and a decrease in physical activity.
In the beginning of the epidemic it might have made sense to close schools. There were concerns about the transmissibility of the virus among children, the risk to teachers and security guards and cleaners, the risk to grandparents and vulnerable parents of children contracting COVID-19 at school and bringing it home. s we learned these risks were Aminor and that children mainly caught the virus from adults around them and not vice versa. There is concern about the long term effects of COVID. This last is still valid but the more we learn about the virus the more we realise that its effects on children are minor.
We know now how to reduce the risk of transmission in indoor settings such as schools through good ventilations systems and air-filtration systems.
This can range from opening doors and windows to allow ventilation through classrooms and hallways, to open air classes, to HEPA filters that completely clean the air several times an hour.
Rapid 15 minute at-home antigen testing is a simple, quick way of identifying infectious individual and ensuring they stay our of the school environment until they are past the infectious period.
They should be available free for the children, teachers and anyone working in schools.
Schools should be the last thing to be closed and the first to be opened.
Not cigarette companies and fast food places.
In 2022 instead of closing schools, we need to focus on the protections we now have: vaccination, ventilation, filtration of the air and identifying infectious individuals with rapid home testing.
It’s also time we decide that schools are as essential as hospitals, supermarkets, pharmacies and other institutions that stayed open during the strictest lockdowns.