> The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.

Unlikely. The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance. Even unstructured homeschoolers, who have little to no explicit instruction of any kind, are only on average a grade level behind average children[1]. The last historically comparable school closures, for the 1918 flu pandemic, had no detectable long run effects[2].

[1] The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students

http://zoleerjemeer.nl/files/1313/9109/4391/The_Impact_of_Sc...

[2]School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic https://www.nber.org/papers/w28246

> The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance.

Is this really true if the entire class missed a few years? It is very different having one kid who missed a lot and then later interacts with kids who all didn't miss a lot, and a class where every kid is behind a couple of years.

It's not like every kid is falling behind though. Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright. Zoom and a mask isn't ideal, but a lot less stressful in comparison to something that could easily have given you significant PTSD.

> It's not like every kid is falling behind though.

Yes, in many places it really is. Look at what test results have been released - there is a tiny cohort of kids that managed to remain close to the normal level of achievement, and generally in areas where parents are heavily involved in schooling their kids.

> It's not like every kid is falling behind though.

I wouldn't be surprised if kids who fell behind during remote school are clustered at the same schools.

I kinda agree that long term harms are overstated. I will even add they are overstated for ideological reasons.

> Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright.

But, this is not true. If you look at generations that grew in hard times, they were doing worst. Generations that grew in war are more violent then peace generations. They have more mental health issues, drink more and so on. Famines have long term impact too. There were even studies about Holocaust survivors - even their children have more anxieties and similar mental health issues. The even affected parenting and communication of survivors enough to change children.

Education achievements now are better then they were in those generations.

If you read the second paper you cited, directly from the abstract, you'll see that they explicitly said that 1918 was "starkly different from today":

> Our results are not inconsistent with an emerging literature that finds negative short-run effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning. The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality.

Furthermore, from the paper:

> Another important contrast is that school closures in the 1918-19 pandemic were substantially shorter than current COVID-19 related school closures, potentially limiting their effects. In our sample of 1918-19 school closures, the average closure length was 36 days, and some cities decided to make up for missing school days by extending the school year.

Closing schools is just one of the many measures society has taken to steal the prime years of life from the young to give to the elderly.

Decades? I missed 3 months of 4th grade. The teacher said I should be stuck back in 3rd because 4th grade had moved along so quickly. My mom said no, and put me in the 4th grade class around Christmastime.

I wasn't a day behind. The class had not advanced at all.

But I'm sure the pandemic will be blamed for school unachievement for decades. It's a godsend to the school industrial complex.

I have some bad news for you: if your child is college bound then they are about to go into another environment that has been profoundly damaged by the pandemic: a college campus. Students at my university are angry and depressed about the fact that they're paying thousands of dollars for glorified university of Phoenix. The college social scene is also obviously heavily disrupted, which is probably an underappreciated factor in the development of young people.

If I were of college age and was able, I'd take a gap year or two without any hesitation.

Terrible advice. Gap year is a waste of time and is reserved for rich kids. You won’t be doing anything meaningful with your life due to COVID anyway. You have no employable skill set. You don’t have money because you’re a broke ass 18 year old. If your idea of fun is breaking your back bussing tables at a restaurant 40 hours a week then feel free to get a degree and do it after.

I wouldn’t bother and have seen the effects on people who did skip the last year or two. It’s been terrible for them. They’ve basically been stuck at home doing jack shit and watching years of their life disappear without any progress on literally any front.

You're only stuck at home if you decide to be.

You but how long… gap year seemed like a good move at pandemic start but is been 2 years now with no End in sight

I took four, most of that doing manual labour. Gave me lots of time to think about what I wanted my major to be, a decision I had no answer to at nineteen but had a good idea of at twenty-three. Definitely don't regret that delay.

I think you can start college pretty much at any age as long as you don't already have a degree. It's obviously a huge luxury to do so, but I think you're missing out on so much social and intellectual development if you do college now that it may be worth holding out for 3 years (or maybe more). I'm not saying that college now is completely worthless, but looking from the outside and listening to what students are saying, it seems severely diminished.

At some point you get too old and you outgrow your college peer group. I think 2 years is the most id recommend. College is like 30% study 30% social and 40% getting the initial experience that you can use to start that first job.

I finished my degree after returning from an enlistment, and was about 8-10 years older than the typical "college-aged" peer group. Though ages tended to skew older in the ECE department I attended, with at least a quarter of the EE majors being established over-30 professionals and veterans finishing their own degrees.

Variety in age in socialization is a healthy thing, and I feel cramming entire cohorts into a 24-month bloc isn't particularly amenable to how we've evolved.

Your experience isn’t likely common. Most people I went to college with at university were under the age of 25. The overwhelming majority so. I graduated at 23 and was consistently the oldest or tied for oldest in many of my classes. Outside of community college or graduate programs - people age 26+ are very uncommon.

You also spent enlistment time in a similar to college setting for the social aspects anyway, so you would be less impacted by the lack of it in actual college.

This doesn't pass the smell test to me. Plenty of seniors were friends with freshman and sophomores at my university. Maybe it's a bit rare to see an outgoing senior hanging out with a fresh out of high school freshman but less extreme examples were super common.

I just remember that there were some out of military guys in our program and they never really connected with the other under grads. They had more in common with grad students so perhaps they found more friends amongst that group.

It always surprises that left-leaning politicians and media were the most fervent advocates of school closures, because it has disproportionately affected kids from the poorest backgrounds. What I see around me is that educated couples invested the time to make up for the lack of school education (and were typically home working themselves), so those kids will probably do OK, other kids were left on their own all day.

I think it is more of a relative problem than an absolute problem.

Left leaning politicians were pushed by teachers unions whose job is to advocate for the safety of the teachers.

Left leaning politicians also send their kids to private schools which did not shut down.

they did on the US

They did in the UK

The pandemic is also affecting kids from poorest backgrounds. They are the most likely to loose caregiver due to it. They are more likely to be cared for by grandparents too. 1 in 500 kids lost caregiver overall. That affects them too.

Did your kid go on to college? My two kids did and it's a pretty lousy experience. Classes are mostly online still, cafeterias are take out only, socialization opportunities are mostly gone.

Yes. One was on-campus, and it wasn't ideal but he did OK with it. The other was all online and it didn't go well. He's taking time off now (working, not sitting idle) until he can be fully in-class, on campus.

On campus interactions may not be strictly needed for book learning but they are such a big part of the college experience in general.

My last year of higher edu was remote and I really loved it in 80%

Finally I didn't have to waste time on commute and it was way easier to ignore doubtful profs/useless courses and focus on the right things.

but yea, things may be harder if you don't know people you're studying with

Why did you take useless classes? Colleges give students great leeway in course selection.

I'm sure you've heard of prerequisites, but maybe you haven't encountered any questionable requirements in the classes you took at the schools you attended?

Personally, I had to take classes like "Ancient Eastern Civilizations" while pursuing a degree in Audio Production. So while the term "useless" is a bit strong, I understand where they're coming from.

Caltech had a requirement for classes in social studies. This was a rather broad category, and included things like language, history, and even accounting. So there wasn't any reason for me to select a useless class.

There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Prerequisites, of course, prevent one from wasting the professor's time from unprepared students.

>There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Sure, course is never 100% useless, but when in one course you can learn "10 things" and on this one you can learn "1 thing" and have to spend similar amount of time on them meanwhile you're working full time, studying on weekends and trying to learn other things for your job/career, then things are tricky and you gotta pick - you put effort into some classes that aren't really efficent or maybe some OSS side project?

(not US)

I couldn't

I could only take "specialisation" - a few courses at the last year or something like that.

It could be software engineering / cybersecurity / something else

I graduated from Michigan pre covid and all the cs classes are recorded so you only need to show up to discussion on Fridays. Wasn't a bad experience since you could skip past people's bad questions. Of course we could still meet on campus though.

Highly unlikely. My wife taught children who came out of Sarajevo in the mid-90s and many of them have gone on to excel in life.

Children are resilient. What is _hurting_ them is not the school closures, but the panic and uncertainty that some people have put around this.

That panic and uncertainty is hurting all of us.

>uncertainty is hurting all of us

Simply by observing those around me, I have learned SO much about humans.

We hate uncertainty. I hate it. I remember worrying myself into a frenzy looking at all of these tables predicting exposure and risk. "If we go to the grocery store, we can't see X friend... but if YOU go to the store and spend less than 15 minutes getting peanut butter and bread..." it was a mess.

I also learned that humans are bad at responding to highly unlikely events. All throughout this pandemic, I remind myself that people are making emotional decisions not logical - and they are doing that because we all are really bad at making logical decisions. And then I remind myself to show them love and grace.

What can I do to make your experience a little less frantic? Even if only for 1 minute.

Well HR and universities are going to you know actually do their damm job and make adjustments

Seeing the lower face is important to reading emotion. The masks muffle speech as well. I wonder if children, especially in that critical 2-4 year-old period, will have stunted language and interpersonal skills. It's not right.

So personal anecdote our two year old is behind on speech, we had someone come in to evaluate him and he mentioned that he has been seeing it a lot, citing that because so many people are wearing masks, and the kids weren't spending more time around other people it had created a trend he had noticed.

Why is your two year old seeing a lot of people with masks? Kids aren't expected to wear masks until they turn two, and for under twos, most people I know just have nannies or relatives take care of them, maskless of course. I guess you could do center based care instead because it's sometimes cheaper, but even then the other under 2s will be maskless. My 1 yo doesn't like when I wear a mask, because it is an unusual thing to him. To be clear, where I am I wear masks indoors all the time, but I typically don't take the kids indoors with me, so he only sees it when I run into a cafe or something.

That reply you replied to got flagged, downvoted, murdered.

And it was an extremely tame reply.

Is it just me or is the intolerance for dissent ramping up?

It is exceedingly hard to find places on the internet anymore where one can have a conversation between a range of viewpoints without it turning into an absolute shitshow, or the minority viewpoint being downvoted to oblivion.

It's one of many reasons I find myself using the internet less and less. Even the old forums I used to frequent and have the usual sparring conversations that were fun on the internet have fallen to one side or another, and anything outside the orthodoxy of the forum is treated with absolute hostility, "You are evil for evil's sake, I wish you dead" grade responses. There's no spirit of debate anymore, just a spirit of "Dogpile everyone who thinks differently." From any perspective!

It was a good 25 year run of internet, but I'm pretty much over the place. HN was one of the last sane places and it's been interesting seeing what sort of stuff gets flagged/killed. More and more, it's "That which isn't the groupthink." Which is sad. I'd rather read books from people I disagree with strongly than participate in an echo chamber. At least I'll have to either sharpen my ability to defend my views, or consider points of view I'd not considered before. Even if I decide they're junk, it's useful to understand how people get there and the viewpoints in more depth than shallow internet stuff.

It's not just you.

what was your nephews mask made out of? that sounds very unusual