Sure, the first six months, or even a year can be discounted as an aberration in the child development process and can be compensated for. This is year 3 with no end in sight. Do you even realize how much children develop in 3 years? A 6 year old and a 9 year old have a significant difference in cognitive capabilities and if you stop the learning process, the lifetime effect can be devastating. It doesn’t matter when you’re 30 and have to sit at home, but it absolutely does when you’re a child and your brain is developing.

And based on my long career on the corporate ladder, absolutely no one cares about whether you were a pandemic baby, a child growing up in poverty or pretty much any other non visible handicap in your life. You either know stuff or you don’t.

And since you mentioned World War 2, schools didn’t stop even in WW2, At a time when people didn’t even necessarily need to go to schools to eventually lead a comfortable life.

Essentially, they got a "pass" for 2020 regardless of what their grades were, without ever stepping back into class or remote learning.

We also had a massive hurricane and two smaller ones that year, and that had more people at home in October than the SARS-CoV-2 virus did.

Either way, assuming other states allowed or encouraged remote learning and continue to this day, as of, say April of this year we enter year 3 of remote learning. I'm on mobile so I could be wrong, but I believe the original post said "going on/into 3 years at this point" - or at least that was how I interpreted it.

Also the original commenter was talking about early childhood development, not beuracracy. Everything kids learned from 9/2019 through 2/2020 shouldn't disappear because of what happened that spring. If it does our school systems are even worse than I thought.

You wouldn't say you are going into 30 years 2 months before your 29th birthday. And "no end in sight" makes 0 sense in the context of in person schooling, because the end of remote school is already in the rear view mirror.

Now envision: You are a parent who HAS to work to make ends meet. Your work has to be in person (nurse, meat packing plant etc). You have two kids 3 years apart, say 7 and 10. One you just were able to adjust to school after years of sensory and social issues. The school is closed. The kids cant go in but bars are open.

It's been the norm for some time to have in-person classes. School districts make the headlines when they cancel in-person classes and even then that situation only lasts a couple of weeks. Look at the most recent case in Chicago - it lasted one week. Since I live across the street from a large park I can tell you the kids are in school, they're playing outside, they're doing after school activities, and they're playing sports. I don't know what these people are getting on about acting like kids have been locked in their homes for two years.

What absolute lunancy; certainly you're trolling. Taking the position of sacrificing children is the position of the villain movies.

Fwiw, we name this trade-off all the time. If you think your kid is getting the best possible experience for their development at school then you are pretty naive. School is largely about improving worst case educational outcomes, not fostering maximum growth.

My own children just repurposed the tools used for remote learning, and now interact more with their peers than they did before the pandemic (and its not just video games either: there's a fair amount of creative activity that happens). Kids are incredibly resilient.

Poor education practices like chaining them to Zoon for hours at a time to attend class, on the other hand, would damage anyone, and show there's a long way to go in the remote learning space. You'd have expected some high profile projects to shine, but I haven't heard a lot from them.

There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse.

And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything. If you look at places and regions that kept kids in school and compare them to places that shut schools down, there's no discernable difference in outcomes. Because people intermingled anyway. So we could've at least had kids socializing and developing normally for that cost.

There have been cases where a school system makes headline news by cancelling in-person classes as the infection peaks in their area. These shutdowns have only been for 1-2 weeks. The kids are in school. The kids are doing activities. The kids are alright.

School is in person this school year, although there have been about 10 virtual days so far for his school, all have been in 2022 because of Omicron making staffing really tough. There are a handful of after school activities, but many are canceled. Sports are largely back to normal.

Hope your son is doing okay.

My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.

Plus a lot of parents are paranoid about online interaction to a crazy degree and will hardly let kids interact online - it makes no sense, but they consider it to be the great bogey man of the 21st century and think that pedophiles are ready to instantly jump on their kids, even if they are in a private discord room just chatting.

It’s hard to measure this systematically and I’m glad that your experiences were positive. My kids had marked drop in grades and really suffered. It wasn’t so much the social aspect as teachers and schools not being to adapt to new methods.

I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.

For both fully-remote and alternating-day in-person, if schools still failed kids, they'd have had to fail over half of most classes. Percentages of engaged-enough-to-be-OK kids in online schools tended to sit in the 10-20% range. It wasn't unusual for half or more of kids to effectively be absent for an entire semester. [EDIT] The alternating-day half-in-half-out in-person schedule kids, in the one district that I have insight into that did that for fall 2020/spring 2021, seemed to fare even worse than the online cohort, incidentally.

> I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.

Any places that did them, they'll be awful, guaranteed. IIRC at least some states skipped them in Spring 2020 since it'd have been nearly impossible to proctor them and everyone knew they'd be "tainted" anyway. The main point of them is to compare year-over-year progress to see what needs to be adjusted and whether progress is being made, for which a during-remote-learning standardized test would be worthless, since you already know it'll be bad and why it's bad and won't be able to get any actionable info out of comparing it to prior or future years. It'll probably be another couple years before we have something like a new baseline and the tests start to be useful for their intended purpose again.

Stop inventing new problems that don't exist - there's already enough to go around.

The result is these children don't learn how to read. And studies have shown for ages that if a child is not a proficient reader by grade 3, they will likely never be proficient, ever.

That's just one of many costs. We're leaving these children behind.

Minimizing this does nothing for them. And remember, a depressed kid doesn't always look sad, but can seem happy go lucky as they are trying to be what their parents want them to be.

The teachers are trying their best, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome the nature of these problems, and the effects are absolutely compounding over the past couple of years. It's really, really bad.

Think about it, what are the reasons making close supervision of school-aged children desirable? Their brains are still growing and developing! They often aren’t mature enough to be academically successful when they’re physically isolated and stuck on a shitty google hangout.

Universal education is supposed to be the great equaliser. I can't imagine the current state of remote learning achieves that, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people who push for schools to re-open in-person. I don't think it's worth people dying over, though, especially given that the qualifications are more important than the stuff you learn in school.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/online-l...

There are many ways to help those who want to be helped. If they don't want to be helped.. well that's not a new problem.

I don’t know what you call a person that thinks half of the population are Karens, but it’s absurd.

This is yet another problem that's ignored, swept under the run and "averaged out" as a solution.