School is for Wasting Time and Money
That’s the title of my editorial in the New York Times’ new education symposium on “What is School For?” Read the whole thing on the official website, but here’s my favorite paragraph to whet your interest:
School closures were a disaster for convenience. And while you’ll never hear a “convenience above all” political speech, actions speak louder than words. By February of 2021, about 90 percent of private schools serving elementary or middle schoolers offered in-person instruction. Why? Presumably because they knew that parents cherished the convenience of in-person education. Less than half of corresponding public schools, funded by taxes rather than paying customers, were fully open by that time. Many large districts stayed closed or in hybrid mode for over a year. While the pedagogical costs of closure remain speculative, the convenience costs are beyond all doubt.
I have to say I loved the little bubbles at the bottom of the article where it said "What is school for?" and every one was positive or poetic such as "Hope," "Connecting to Nature," "Care," except for Bryan's which read "Wasting time."
I'm a high-school math teacher, and I largely agree. Couple of quibbles:
1. In my regular classes, the kids learn very little and will retain none of it. In my AP classes, the kids learn a ton. Yes, most will forget it within a year, but many will continue to use the AP Calc and AP Stats concepts for years.
2. "When schools shuttered, they stopped performing their sole undeniably valuable function — providing day care."
I don't view that as the only function. In my experience, students with traumatic home-lives (more than you would expect), find comfort and healing being around the often (though not always) positive and loving adults in a school. You could call this "day care" I suppose, because day care provides the same function, but I wouldn't belittle this benefit-- it's real.
3. Related to point 1. The kids in my AP Calc class learn a ton. Many of them don't learn anything in art. Conversely, there are kids who learn a ton in their ceramics class (you should see some of the things they make) who will learn nothing in a math class. It's almost like brains are empty vessels that are ready to be filled by certain ideas. I'm not saying public school is the answer, but you kind of have to in a school have classes ready to fill different types of brains. Yes, the art student may be wasting his time in my math class, and my calc kid may be wasting his time in art class, but they are in fact both learning something at some point.
4. Also just to say is $15,000/kid for daycare that bad a deal, especially because they are in fact learning at least something?
These are just quibbles your main points are I believe exactly right