My youngest daughter, who is 15, raised her arms triumphantly and expressed her massive sense of relief with the simple words “finally,” “yes,” and “at last.” What had made her day, her week, and probably her whole year was news that her school would open for in-person classes next month.
A year after she and her friends were sent home from middle school, never to return or graduate, rumor and forlorn hope have finally given way to certainty that she will meet the freshmen classmates with whom she has been taking high school lessons via video since August. They can make friends and live the sort of social life we humans are evolved to live, and which children are bursting to enjoy.
The immediate and long-term effects of social distancing strictures during the COVID-19 pandemic are hotly debated — there are conflicting reports, for example, about whether suicides have surged or not — but no parent of school-aged children can doubt that their sons and daughters yearned increasingly desperately to shed their shackles, get out, and live again.
Yet, as we detail in a magazine themed this week on the nightmare of unnecessarily shuttered schools, the people whose vocation it supposedly is to teach the young are in many cases refusing to return to work. Teachers unions are adamant that their members must be allowed to abandon their jobs on full pay despite the fact that returning to the blackboard presents no danger.
Almost worse is that President Biden, who excoriated President Donald Trump for failing to “follow the science,” is backing recalcitrant teachers against his own top medical adviser, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was dismissed as speaking in her private capacity when she said teachers could go back to work safely without vaccination.
Parents and students have, as we note on our cover, reached “The Boiling Point.” The pandemic, Seth Mandel writes, has exposed the corruption, apathy, and insouciance of many (not all) who work in the public school system — private schools are now mostly back nearer to normal — and their unions’ corrosive bond with the Democratic Party, to whom they give 98% of their campaign dollars. Teachers’ indifference to facts is also clear in Grant Addison’s feature on the wholesale renaming of schools in California, a process in which the merits of the greatest Americans in history have sometimes been dismissed after consideration lasting only a matter of seconds.
If there is a silver lining to the tendentious and selfish unreasonableness that has characterized 12 months of varying lockdowns, it is that the teachers unions might finally have gone too far and thereby sacrificed the unearned esteem in which the public has long held them. Perhaps after seeing how casually they have brushed aside the interests of students nationwide, it will be more readily appreciated that their decadeslong hostility to reform and school choice has always been at the expense of the neediest children.
