The Silent and Destructive Effects of Unnecessarily Closing Schools

 There will be many articles like this one as we move forward.

This isn't a good story.  In it you'll hear about how our most high risk students, in the worst neighborhoods, have had their lives and their educations obliterated by the lockdowns.

The authors are brave souls.  Why?  Because they explain that school age children are not at risk for Covid-19.  This means that closing schools down was not only unnecessary, but also incredibly destructive for school age children.  This is an opinion that I and a few others were talking about by late May 2020.  The data has never supported shutting down schools.

The responses we always got were always the same: "follow the SCIENCE!!"  "Flattenthecurve!!" "Covid is serious!!"  

People are easily led, and when their favorite corporate media source, or a politician tells them something, they listen and obey.  

This unwillingness to question has come at a high price:

"I have chosen to tell the story of Shemar’s remote-learning difficulties, with his family’s permission, because it was his plight that alerted me to the fact that remote learning was proving disastrous. As the spring went on, I grew increasingly distressed by the lack of public alarm over students like Shemar, who were sitting in countless dark rooms, safe from COVID-19, perhaps, but adrift and alone. Society’s attention to them has always been spotty, but they had at least been visible — one saw them on the way to school, in their blue or burgundy uniforms, or in the park and the playground afterward. Now they were behind closed doors, and so were we, with full license to turn inward. While we dutifully stayed home to flatten the curve, children like Shemar were invisible." (emphasis mine)

Children like Shemar weren't invisible at all. They were the ones who no longer had access to the breakfast and lunch programs.  Internet connectivity isn't an issue when you're an upper middle class person who secretly enjoys working from home.  While the author was dutifully staying home to flatten the curve, hundreds of thousands of at risk student were unnecessarily getting their lives and educations manhandled.  

Anyone with a dissenting view of the lockdowns was shouted down.  Anyone with a view that countered the government's was maligned and called a 'conspiracy theorist'.  

It's still going on.  As the amorphous term 'cases' is being used to justify lockdowns, the stultifyingly dense mayor of NYC is shutting down school in hot spots.  

Toward the end of the article, you'll see how ill informed, ignorant, and math deprived the 'leaders' of public schools can be.  This is from a big shot at the NEA:

"Becky Pringle, the president of the other national teachers’ union, the National Education Association, was also confident that parents now leaving the public schools for home schooling or private schools would return. “Our parents and communities still believe in our schools, that they are a foundation of democracy,” she said when we spoke on the second day of school in Baltimore. “I don’t think they’re going to abandon schools.” I asked Pringle why her union, like others, had put such emphasis on the virus’s health risks to children, and she said, “When we look at the data and they say only .1% of kids will contract it and get seriously ill and die, that’s actually around 50,000 children.” I noted that the number of children known to have died of COVID-19 nationwide was around 100. She said her estimate was what could happen if kids did go back to school."

Think about how stupid you have to be to hear that around 100 children nationwide have died of COVID, and then cling to the number of 50,000 'if children go back to school'.  

These are the people in high positions in the Education Industrial Complex.  They are destructive, and have no thoughts of their own.

We will see many more stories like this.  Few of them will reach the mainstream.  Soon you'll see sectors of the economy like the restaurant / food industry and contracting talked about.  This isn't going to end well, and it was all pointless hysteria.