One of my siblings is going to school once a week, I think lockdowns definitely fried some brains.
Here’s some data: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/pisa-und-pandemie-lerndefizit-wegen-geschlossener-schulen-fehlanzeige-496463346068
Children in Sweden, where they never closed schools, are performing worse than counterparts in other countries where they closed schools the longest.
Choice quote, translated with google:
If you compare the cumulative PISA performance in mathematics, reading and science in 25 European countries over the same period, Sweden is one of the nations with higher losses. Countries with long and strict corona measures such as Ireland or Italy, however, lost almost no PISA points. There is no direct causal connection between the duration of closed schools and educational performance. The authors of the official Swiss Pisa report also confirm this.
Covid is known to cause brain damage. It crosses the blood brain barrier. For instance, people losing their sense of smell, or having it altered for months or years, is a result of brain damage and was one of the most common reported effects of covid. It’s also widely reported that people are having memory problems after a covid infection.
This study from Africa found 50% of covid survivors (lots of undiagnosed cases, so this is likely only people who were hospitalized or sought medical care) had lingering health problems, mostly psychological.
The team, led by researchers from the University of Bari in Italy, found a long-COVID rate of 48.6%, with a predominance of psychiatric conditions, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (25.8%).
The most common neurologic symptom was cognitive impairment (15%), and shortness of breath was the most common respiratory symptom (18.3%), followed by cough (10.7%). Other notable symptoms were loss of appetite (12.7%), weight loss (10.4%), fatigue (35.4%), and muscle pain (15.5%). A quarter (25.4%) of patients reported poor quality of life.
Kids aren’t immune, they only had severe consequences at a much lower rate. Many weren’t vaccinated at all, or aren’t continuing to be vaccinated, because of the myth that covid doesn’t hurt kids and reinfections are benign.
The current understanding is that the odds of long term health impacts, long covid, from an infection is basically the same as you rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice, each time you are infected. Those are bad odds and even if kids fare better than adults at the moment, it’s going to have a big impact.
I vividly remember being a kid, and hearing liberal politicians promising to stop monster class sizes of 25 kids to a room from ever happening.
My children are in school now, and their classes are regularly 40+ kids. Good work, libs.
Overworked parents that are forced to spend more time finding the means to provide for their children than actually raising them.
I think unrestricted early access to technology exacerbates it a lot. I had an iPad by the time I was in 3rd grade, but my parents limited my use, and there weren’t as many dopamine frying apps. A lot of exhausted parents today will let their kid spend hours at a time on their tablet; and it’s not like making kids play outside is common anymore in an unwalkable country that fear mongers kids getting kidnapped the second they’re away from their parents
It’s a really hard and stressful job and you get paid really badly for it. I haven’t watched the video and maybe it’s just a clickbait title, but the generational framing here seems unhelpful and misleading. Teaching has had a very high percentage of people leaving the profession for a number of years now. The reason is that teachers are underpaid, overworked and honestly underappreciated. This has only gotten worse and worse as neoliberal reforms have restructured both the profession and society. That might create the appearance of ‘teachers can’t stand the new kinds of young people we have now’, but that isn’t the underlying reason for people leaving the profession
I often try to reframe the same thinking when my mother complaints about her students. It is true that for the last 2-3 years though that the kids had an especially bad behavioral track, but with the new class the consensus seems to be more that they’re better behaved in a general sense. I also try to point out that her generational framing is inaccurate since they’re literally children and children of any generation can be absolutely awful. I also try to point out that in general most of the families that “aren’t involved” likely aren’t lazy, but instead overwhelmed with keeping above water that enforcing education becomes a lot more difficult.
Then there’s the job itself, she’s usually putting in 10 hours a day at school, brings home work some times, they don’t get the planning periods they need, shortstaffing sometimes requires them to cover other teachers’ classes, the special education department was gutted with them mainlining all but the most disabled of those students, they’re constantly making changes in processes that really have no need beyond some administrator looking like they’re doing something which leads to things needing complete reworks, when administration comes around they’ll either spout out empty platitudes or just mostly ignore anything of import, administration will tear teachers down for not being a textbook teacher, and it goes on and on with stuff I don’t see coming home. For all of this, my mother hasn’t gotten a raise in like a decade now, she’s at the top of the pay scale and at best she gets cost of living increases that maybe amount to a few hundred a year. I make more than her at the bottom of most nursing pay scales. When I first started at the hospital I made 28/hr, I make 40/hr outside of the hospital and make more than my mother that works more than I do because she’s salaried. She also has way more qualifications than I do, I have a 2 year degree, she’s Masters+.
All this is to say that in a similar fashion, I saw the video, thought the framing was reductive, and didn’t click. Maybe they explain it better, but the generational framing when there’s so much more to it, even if just clickbait, means that they’re not properly looking at the underlying problems.
Completely! The demands made on teachers are completely untenable. My ex worked in a primary school and they would go to work at 7am, get home at 8pm, and then work the whole of Sunday doing marking/prep. They ended up leaving the profession because the stress made it physically impossible for them to continue. Most public sector workers are compensated appallingly, especially when you consider how important the work they do is. It’s such a waste of resources to spend all this money and time training people for a profession only to place them in conditions where 50% burn out within 5 years. The Graeber argument about the inverse relationship between the usefulness of labour and its compensation feels so accurate
Probably a number of factors. City schools are experiencing this more than suburban schools. Budget cuts, lockdowns stressing a sector already on shaky legs, and the routine switch-up had a big impact on a lot of young people. Not even them, plenty of adults seem to have been psychologically damaged by the lockdowns.
Will this become evened out by future generations that didn’t experience lockdown? Maybe. But there’s still the lingering issue of budget cuts and the presence of far-right movements in school boards.
