Quite a Pickle

Well, as Hardy never said to Laurel, this is quite a pickle we’re in.

The main pickle, in my humble opinion, is what to do with the kids.  They need to be kept out from underfoot while we bang our heads against the walls!  But seriously, while I don’t seriously believe that one semester’s absence from school would hurt any kid at all, multiple semesters really could.  I’m not an expert, but there are issues quite apart from the curriculum: social development, and the stress level of the little guys, which translates into the stress level of the adults.

Let’s briefly talk about online education, and home schooling.

Teachers hate online education, and so do parents.  Parents are coming to hate home schooling, because the stressed-out kids are difficult to handle, and the material isn’t completely ready (I don’t know this for certain, but I strongly suspect) for delivery by parents, who are amateurs.  If parents knew the subject-matter, it would be very different.  But it is the American Way (pardon my French) not to take school information seriously.  School is, for many of us, something we do—did, at one time, anyway—between keeping track of what was happening in baseball.

In some families, the kids would pay attention, if the adults who delivered the material were rotated.  Instead of Mom delivering all the curriculum, what if Uncle Bill did it every other day, while Mom taught Uncle Bill’s kids?  Kids would pay much more attention to a competent relative or friend, instead of their parents the whole time.  (Uncle Bill would have to talk to the kids over Zoom, or some such application; I'm not advocating that Bill should come visiting.)

The schoolwork has to be rationed out in very tiny doses.  Forget several hours at a time.  Half an hour is as much as they could stand.

These sheltering times have the potential for being a period in which some kids learn more than they have ever learned before, if teachers and parents and friends all collaborate on being creative about home schooling.

Home Schooling is not the only thing on our minds, obviously.  Business owners are trying to think how to adjust to the fact that their business has the potential to be a super-spreading center, which would ruin their reputations, and cause the authorities to shut them down.  Meanwhile, they can’t lay off too many people indiscriminately, because it would make it difficult to open back up once the time is right.  (Right now, in many localities, the time is not right.  Where we live, we had COVID cases only in double digits until this week, when we’ve gone into the triple digits.)

Many of us find it difficult to be creative and imaginative in coming up with solutions, because the chief engine of our creativity was the ability to talk with our buddies.  Most of our ideas arrive when we’re shooting the breeze with the guys (or gals).

We need to be creative and imaginative about delivering the curriculum—it has to be a highly modified curriculum, because of our dramatically changed circumstances—to the kids, all the way from Kindergarten to high school, and even college, and, furthermore, it has to be done for, as far as we can see, only a couple of years, at the most.  Nobody is willing to devote the best of their thinking to a temporary solution to a temporary problem.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but many conservatives, especially the poorly educated ones, have the mindset, probably, that education is basically the responsibility of the liberals.  (The exception is when it comes to Creationism, and Political and Economic theory.)  The liberals do not have a problem with this; they’re perfectly willing to devote some thought to the problem of education, in good times.  Right now, they’re worrying about so many things—the pandemic, the state of the economy, the mental health of their friends, the November elections, the foolishness of the White House, the infuriating onslaught from Fox News—that being creative about the kids is the furthest from their minds.  So the normal Brains Trust is too distracted to think about schooling.

And, most tragically, many of us are concerned mostly with getting the kids back to some magically enhanced school situation where they will not be at risk for infection (good luck with that), but which will allow the parents to go to work the second that the various regional administrations give the word to “Open Up,” and provide good rules for opening up safely.  (Good luck with that, too.  I’m not against it; I just sincerely doubt that typical workers have the intelligence to put into operation sane procedures that would keep themselves and their co-workers safe from infection.)

Look, in the Third World, people live in such densely populated areas, such as high-rise tenements, so that if one person gets the infection, pretty soon the entire building gets the infection, just because the virus piggy-backs on water droplets and gets into circulation in the air.  For example, in airplanes, to avoid infections, the air has to be very aggressively purified before re-circulation.  (They also dry the air, because dry air is easier to filter.  That's why many of us find ourselves coughing when we fly.)  In the tenements of poor countries, air filtration systems do not exist, and there are enormous infection spikes.

We, in the USA, are lucky, because our population density is very much thinner, except in the poor neighborhoods where practical nurses, and meat packers live.  The burden of this epidemic (okay, pandemic; it makes no difference) falls more squarely on the poor.  Trump’s administration is steadily loosening environmental regulations, so that the pollution makes it difficult to breathe, on top of the effects of the coronavirus on people with breathing problems.  It is almost as if the affluent elements in the GOP were deliberately trying to exterminate the poor, who usually vote Democrat.  (I’m sure this is not really an objective; but if they see that this is the appearance their policies have, they might reconsider.)

So remember: it is going to take a degree of creativity to solve the short-term problem of the education of kids, both great (college-age) and small; and people need to think logically about what they need to do if, and when, their community decides to open up.  A bad mask is better than no mask.  Distancing is important.  Any businesses that can carry out some of their operations in the open air are likely to be better at preventing infection than those whose operation have to take place indoors.  (My daughter works in a printing press; unfortunately, outdoor printing presses do not exist.  And she lives in Arizona, where you cannot keep the doors open in the 100 degree heat.)  Aggressive ventilation and filtration is important.  That’s a business opportunity for any company that can improve existing air circulation equipment.

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