Sweltering through the hot days of summer, school seems a long way off, but it seems to be on the minds of many. Parents, teachers, employers, and the general public are watching closely, waiting for news about what education will look like in the fall.
There is no easy answer to the dilemma of how to safely run a school system during a global pandemic, and it seems hard to even find consensus on the basic merits of doing so. There are many conflicting perspectives about whether schools should open and how. Like many issues that have come up over the past few months of lock down, I feel like there is an exciting opportunity here to break from the status quo. Re-opening schools will require creativity and re-imagining what it is we need from our education system.
What will we do about medically fragile children and family members? Emotionally fragile or anxious children and family members? Those with allergies or the common cold? If we continue on with expectations as before, are we setting up ALL children for failure when we charge ahead, disregarding the effect of frequent absences, stress, and trauma?
In the months since school closed, I’ve heard a lot less of “New math makes no sense” and a lot more of “I can’t work with my child at home.” In the arguments for re-opening, I’ve heard a lot of “My child needs socialization” and “I need to be able to do my job.” What we are describing here, folks, is childcare. I would suggest that at this point, childcare and social-emotional well-being are miles up the list from standardized testing, individual curriculum expectations, and even certain subject areas. After six months without socialization, and many children with trauma inflicted by dysfunctional family dynamics, being entertained primarily by screens, and an overdose of frightening news, it seems reasonable to believe that school-as-normal will be impossible in the fall, no matter how safe we can make it. With the understanding that some families will choose to keep their children at home, and that many students will be out of school with minor ailments throughout the year, it seems like continuing the curriculum as before is unrealistic at best, and more likely harmful to the overall system, since it will be impossible to apply consistently or equitably.
What if we took a break from school as it has traditionally been carried out and catered to our current needs? What if we used this time to experiment with what actually works for students, and not just the presumed normative student, but the wide variety of students who actually walk through our doors?
What if we listened to what society really needs from our education system, and used this time of uncertainty to invest in the long-term mental health of children and families as well as figuring out how to educate for the 21st century? What if we met needs instead of expectations? Let’s face it – the curriculum expectations consist of a somewhat arbitrary set of criteria that have been shaped over the years to reflect what we think students should know at given ages. According to Wikipedia, the school system originally “provided not only the skills needed in an early industrialized world (reading, writing, and arithmetic) but also a strict education in ethics, duty, discipline and obedience.” Over the years, this focus has changed to reflect changes in society, but not at nearly the rate that society has changed. Most expectations have grown so that we are now asking teachers to impart a ridiculous amount of knowledge to all children that only some will need, completely ignoring aptitude, interest, and relevance. Some years ago, we decided that students needed a year less education and we cancelled grade 13. To be clear, I don’t think there was a great clamour of parents that thought their children would be ready to leave home a year earlier, nor a decree from post-secondary institutions or the job market that students were coming out over-prepared. This was a financial decision, designed to save money by removing one year of publicly funded education. So we CAN change those arbitrary decisions. As the drive to be better, faster, smarter has increased, with competition to enter post-secondary education and even particular high schools, we have pushed children toward formalized education at younger and younger ages. There is a ton of research showing that children learn best through play and that early reading instruction can actually harm students’ long-term success. Many countries that perform high academically start their formal education later. What if we experiment with some of those models now?
With an inevitable imbalance in the coming year among students with different circumstances, this seems a great time to re-evaluate how we approach education, especially in the younger grades. As radical an idea as it may sound, I am suggesting we consider a learner-driven childcare setting of sorts, with pilot projects assessing different learning strategies and environments, as opposed to a return to ‘normal’ academics. To be fair, I am in favour of these kinds of reforms to the education system all the time, but hear me out on why this is a particularly good opportunity to try it out.
We are not done with the Coronavirus, and it is not done with us. Unlike our neighbours to the south, Canadians seem reluctant to venture back into reality as we knew it before. That means that a good portion of students likely won’t be back in school next year. For those who are, the tolerance level for attending when sick will presumably be a lot lower. Think how often children under 16 have stuffy noses, dry coughs, sneezing, and/or fever. If they need to be tested or quarantined for 14 days each time they catch a cold, then the average child is going to miss a lot of school next year. If each class, or school, is going to be quarantined for 14 days for every positive case, which would make sense, then children are going to miss even more school. For many, if not all, the sudden return to school after months of ‘parenting by screen’ will be difficult, and for those with anxiety, the new protocols will be mildly traumatizing at best, and incapacitating at worst. Mental health will need to be a priority, which is tricky when trying to maintain curriculum standards that were hard to reach even under ‘normal’ circumstances. We will need to catch students up from an extended absence, undo the trauma of learning at home (with parents who were not prepared to teach without criticism), and manage increased anxiety and frustration. Teachers will be scrambling to catch students who fell through the cracks in the early closure, there will be a backlog of need for testing and social services, and there will be absences from teachers who are sick or required to quarantine because of exposed family members.
So what if we put students in smaller groups, spread out teachers who are currently providing extra academic support, and focused on social skills, mental health, resilience, and basic academic skills? Students would be encouraged to pursue topics of interest and supported in hands-on exploration of real-life materials and real-world problems. Released from the demands of the current curriculum, students could work on communication skills, leadership, and critical thinking – skills that are valued in today’s work environment, but which are hard to teach well when we are bogged down by all of the expectations put forward for each grade.
I understand that there isn’t enough money to fund extra teachers and the extra space it would take to teach all children in small cohorts every day. But to be fair, there wasn’t money to provide CESB either, but somehow we made that work because it was deemed a necessity. Forcing people to choose between their children and their careers is a recipe for disaster, setting back women’s rights, and increasing poverty and reliance on social services. Furthermore, it disproportionately affects single-parent and low-income families. Getting children back to school IS a necessity, if only to free up the government from having to pay EI and CESB indefinitely. People want and need to work, and they need to know their children are safe.
As for safety, either it is safe to be in class or it is not. The way I see it, a hybrid model is the worst possible solution. Being in some limbo state is not only risky, it is not much better for children’s mental health than being home, and in fact, may be worse for many. Because parents need to work, children will need to be cared for daily. That means if they are in school only part time, then they will be elsewhere the rest of the time. That means that in every cohort of 15 students, likely half will be in some form of daycare, either licensed or not, and several others will be cared for by aging grandparents. Say the daycares have an average of 10 children each – each cohort of 15 just became a cohort of 100, with at least a handful of seniors thrown into the mix for good measure. We’d be better off with consistent classes of 20 or 25, except that there isn’t room in classrooms to distance that many children.
It appears that children are not strong transmitters of COVID, although it is unclear whether that is because they don’t carry and transmit it or because they haven’t left their homes in four months. I am not advocating to go back to school unsafely, but I do feel that children should be in school if it’s possible. There will never be a guarantee of safety for children or staff in schools – not before a vaccine, not after a vaccine, and not before we had ever heard of Coronavirus. I’ve heard the argument that we can’t go back until it is completely safe, but to be realistic, driving in cars is not safe, but we still take kids out in them. I’m not saying that I am okay with any number of dead children, nor am I willing to needlessly risk the lives of teachers or the extended family of children who attend school, but I am saying that we need to find ways, like seatbelts and speed limits, to make school safe enough that children can return without undue concern, monitoring and responding quickly to local outbreaks. I don’t think it is healthy or realistic to believe that elementary school children can consistently and comfortably maintain physical distancing, wear masks, and avoid sharing materials. We must absolutely teach them to practise good hygiene, but we need to find ways to make schools safe for everyone in them. No form of learning can be effective in an environment of uncertainty and fear. Safe re-opening must include the option of daily attendance, paid sick leave for both teachers and parents, clear and consistent enforcement of attendance protocols, and smaller, self-contained cohorts.
It might include flexibility for parents who want to keep kids home – that takes the pressure off the public to pay for ALL students to be in class. Those who do better OUT of class might get online support, or some kind of organized home-schooling support. It might include the adoption of more outdoor learning centres, where students would spend most or all of their day outside. Alternatively, it might make use of other community spaces, like recreation centres, to accommodate physical distancing while keeping kids in school full time. Really radical ideas might include mixed age groupings, where siblings could be kept in the same class to reduce the circles of contagion. If we weren’t so hung up on grade level expectations, mixed age groupings could encourage leadership and collaboration in ways we can’t even imagine.
Let’s not go back to normal. Let’s go back to something better. We need to stop pretending that a one-size-fits-all model works well for every child and start finding innovative ways to meet the needs of those who don’t fit the mould we’ve been using for the last hundred years. If we took a year ‘off’ school as we’ve known it and provided much needed childcare in educational settings that felt safe and unpressured, there is no telling what amazing and creative ideas might emerge. What better opportunity to start re-imagining than right now, when our whole lives have shifted and we aren’t sure what the next year holds? Let’s turn this time of uncertainty into a gift and invest in what truly matters.
Out of the Well 