The manifestation of apparently long-standing, coordinated, and unchecked homophobic bullying at Aberdeen Central High School last week could make gay and straight kids alike wonder why they’d want to give up remote learning and return to the classroom and the physical bullying. (Now if they can just avoid the f-bombs online….) Some kids learn better online, and places like Ontario are considering keeping online options available even after we all get our shots.
One Texas student offers another reason to stick with remote learning—contrary to the new Big Lie circulating among cheapskate business owners, she wants to work:
Pauline Rojas’s high school in San Antonio is open. But like many of her classmates, she has not returned, and has little interest in doing so.
During the coronavirus pandemic, she started working 20 to 40 hours per week at Raising Cane’s, a fast-food restaurant, and has used the money to help pay her family’s internet bill, buy clothes and save for a car.
Ms. Rojas, 18, has no doubt that a year of online school, squeezed between work shifts that end at midnight, has affected her learning. Still, she has embraced her new role as a breadwinner, sharing responsibilities with her mother who works at a hardware store.
“I wanted to take the stress off my mom,” she said. “I’m no longer a kid. I’m capable of having a job, holding a job and making my own money” [Dana Goldstein, “Schools Are Open, But Many Families Remain Hesitant to Return,” New York Times, 2021.05.09].
Obviously Ms. Rojas’s early adult choices don’t extrapolate down to first graders. But her willingness to work reminds me of Leon Botstein‘s proposal that we reform education getting rid of our high school holding pens, condensing K-12 curriculum into nine or ten years of more intense study, and taking advantage of all that restless teenage energy by turning it loose sooner on the world of work or college, whichever young people may choose, so they may sooner and more constructively figure out and launch into their lives’ great work. Evidently remote learning offers some students a chance to develop and exercise their maturity, setting their own schedules and finding opportunities to work that wouldn’t be available amidst a normal, regimented school routine.
The US primary education “system” is too decentralized for meaningful reform. The US primary education system should adopt the models of first world education systems: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, etc. Kids should have 220-230 – ish school contact days per year, in addition to all the other improvements practiced in the education-leading nations.
“Regimental ism” is so ingrained in the thinking of especially the GOP party but is also common in the Democrats. Witness the “follow the ‘leader’ mantra of the GOP (like the elephants on parade they are!) currently with the Cheney debacle. Change and doing or trying ‘something different’ is not good to a Republican, unless of course it is their ‘change’.
It does no good to cower. Hiding behind a Zoom screen is not the way John Lewis would have desegregated lunch counters or bus transportation in the Deep South. Remote learning has a place in education, but it should not be used as a coward’s way out from addressing bullying.
The real cowards are the adults who allow the bullying Mr. Pay. Using a computer to get ahead is now and the future, just zoom ahead kids, the future is yours.