Viewers of CBS's Face the Nation were treated to an uncomfortable truth-bombing Sunday when Jan Crawford spoke about the effect of endless and needless COVID restrictions on children’s education and mental health.
Asked to talk about the most underreported story of 2021, Crawford did not even hesitate.
“It’s the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children,” she said. She continued, “School closures, lockdowns, cancellation of sports — you couldn’t even go on a playground in the D.C. area without cops scurrying, shooing the kids off. Tremendous negative impact on kids. And it’s been an afterthought.”
It’s a fact. The attitude of erring on the side of caution may have had some merit in the first months of the pandemic. But many officials took the deliberate decision to ignore all the trade-offs of hypersafetyism, and they persisted in this folly long after knowledge of the disease dictated otherwise. Lockdowns and part-time schedules continued into the current academic year, disrupting learning more than almost any other activity. This was done even after children were known to be at almost no risk from COVID.
Why? That decision was entirely a political one. It was taken in order to placate Democrats’ allies — the teachers unions, the driving force in preventing children from getting an education in the COVID era. Emails acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request show that President Joe Biden’s White House has collaborated in their shenanigans. Biden’s lackeys, directed by the teachers unions, reversed and overrode what should have been a science-based recommendation that school could resume in the spring, even before teachers were fully vaccinated.
The great villain in all this has been Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. She, more than anyone, was a public voice against schooling children. The results for the children, as Crawford noted Sunday, have been devastating.
Crawford referenced the surgeon general’s warning that the pandemic is augmenting what was already a growing threat to youth mental health. She also cited “learning loss,” the very real and lasting educational deficit witnessed by 97% of educators surveyed. The learning loss has been most acutely felt by black and Hispanic students, meaning that existing gaps in learning have been exacerbated by the restrictions. And although no direct link has been established, the lockdown environment has been correlated with a huge spike in suicides by nonwhite youth.
Note that these consequences are trade-offs for a policy that supposedly protects the young from a virus that, to all appearances, poses them no threat at all. As Crawford noted, even teenagers are far more likely to die in a car wreck than to experience serious illness from COVID. She could have added that the flu kills more children in a single season than the novel coronavirus has killed in two years of the pandemic.
This will be a defining element of the Biden White House’s legacy. In order to placate an influential Democratic interest group, adults in positions of authority forced a mental health crisis upon children and set back their learning by more than a year. They also subjected working parents in service industries especially, disproportionately nonwhite and lower-income adults, to a miserable and untenable situation in which full-time in-person schooling was not an option and daycare opportunities were both expensive and increasingly rare.
“If our policies don’t reflect a more measured and reasonable approach for our children,” Crawford summarized Sunday, “they will be paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives.”
Indeed. Long after the nation’s families are done mourning for the victims of the initial coronavirus outbreak, this man-made crisis of the nation’s future will be felt and regretted.
No comments:
Post a Comment