The year we gave up on education
by Joanna Williams, spiked:
Children have been badly let down in this year of Covid. Before 2020, well-meaning campaigners talked about children’s rights or worried about the mental health of young people. This year, all that was forgotten. Coronavirus made it acceptable to keep children at home, isolated from their friends, for months on end. Playgrounds were locked, leisure centres closed, sports and music clubs banned from meeting. It became permissible to suggest dousing children with disinfectant, corralling them into freezing classrooms, and providing them with mashed potato dinners, in bags, to be eaten with their hands.
In 2020, children became a problem to be managed. They were either objects of pity, dependent on the efforts of footballers to prevent imminent starvation, or snotty, infected virus-transmitters, intent on killing the elderly. The mass closure of schools, and the abandonment of education, revealed the lack of collective will to do much more than simply keep children alive. Teaching them, socialising young people into the ways of the world, and preparing them for the future, were all rapidly jettisoned.
The seeds of our response to Covid-19 were sown long before the virus was discovered. It is because education was already held in questionable regard, and schools and universities often struggled to find a sense of purpose, that they could be so readily closed. But we must not forget what an unprecedented move it was to shut schools all across the country, in response to a virus that poses minimal risk to children. In times past, when flu, diphtheria or tuberculosis posed serious threats to young people, there were no national directives ordering the mass closure of schools. Teachers, especially those who worked in deprived neighbourhoods, knew they faced risks to their own health but the importance of educating children and the sense of duty and service that mission engendered, overrode personal concerns.
Read also: The challenges of being a student in the middle of a pandemic by Lydia Lee, Christian Today
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