Now is a good time to rethink how we educate kids

Educators, academic experts, parents and — in their own way -even kids have been saying that public education is broken for nearly two decades.

Now, as schools announce they’ll be closed for the remainder of the academic year, public education has been yanked into a thousand little pieces, and no one knows what will emerge from the mess.

Millions of children across the country are out of school and completely un-engaged with academics, either because they have no computer or no reliable internet access at home. Others may have those resources, but they still lack caregivers who are able (or, let’s face reality here, (BEG ITAL)willing(END ITAL)) to assist small children in remote learning. Let’s be clear: For the youngest learners, it’s absolutely necessary to have an adult facilitate the e-learning process, including the “turning in” of assignments and all the rest of it.

The very oldest learners are a challenge in and of themselves.

My youngest son is a reluctant freshman at a community college. He was seduced into a vocational program on the promise of sharpening his welding and metal manufacturing skills. To his surprise, he actually enjoyed his first semester, and second semester was going well, too. He discovered that he had a genuine zeal for metallurgy, in which there is a potential for a four-year college degree.

This all came to a screeching halt at mid-semester.

Yesterday, he seemed exceptionally down. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he felt hopeless because, “Zoom classes really suck.” He also wasn’t able to work with his teacher on his welding projects, and whoknows-when those sessions could be made up. In effect, he didn’t see any way forward for himself within the current and unknowable future of education.

The middle and high school students are their own puzzle. They’re just capable enough to mostly manage their own e-learning — and savvy enough with computers to evade actual e-classes.

The historian and author Angie Maxwell recently shared this story on Twitter: “Found the kid playing with her dog instead of Zooming with her teacher. She told me not to worry. She took a screenshot of herself ‘paying attention,’ then cut her video & replaced it with the picture. ‘It’s a gallery view of 20 kids, mom. They can’t tell.’ She is 10 . ... She says she took a full-screen screen shot, cropped it, made it a virtual background, and covered the webcam with a sock. Yes, I’m both proud and scared.”

And of course, there is everything in between, from students asking their teachers for more assignments (yes, these students really do exist) to those who are turning in super shoddy work late and putting in the most minimal effort possible in a show meant to appease parents and teachers alike.

In fact, not only are we in uncharted territory for the remainder of this academic year, but the pandemic has opened us up to reimagining what “school” really must be for our kids and grandkids, according to a column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution by Hilary Hughes and Stephanie Jones, who are University of Georgia professors at the Department of Educational Theory and Practice.

The rat race of K-12 public education as a preparation and sorting device for colleges — and then lucrative careers — has resulted in “a system that has seduced us into believing that education is linear, predictable, and quantifiable,” the authors write. “... It is a system that has forgotten the important things about life and learning.”

I couldn’t agree more. But I also worry about who gets to decide what the important things are.

Some kids really do depend on school for their only two guaranteed meals of the day, and they love their teachers like parents because the school staff are the only adults they can truly rely on. Other kids simply need launching pads for their brilliance and precocity. Still more fall somewhere in between.

We must emerge from the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 with a vision for a public education system that affirms all students as unique learners with wildly different needs from their grade-level peers — and a plan for educating them in a way that doesn’t drive all of them to despair.