Articles focusing on Education at Brownstone Institute feature opinion and analysis of education policy, trends, and current events, including impacts on social life, public health, freedom of speech, and personal liberty. All Brownstone Institute Education articles are auto-translated into multiple languages.
The public schools cannot be fixed. The bureaucracy is over crowded. Union control is absolute. Awful ideas abound about everything. There is a tendency to rely on technology rather than time-tested fundamentals as the preferred solution to any problem. As a result, the amount of technology is overwhelming; The amount of basic reading, writing, and arithmetic – vastly underwhelming.
This paper is exactly the type of analysis that is crucial to quantifying the effect of Covid Policy response on our children’s education. Unfortunately, it’s after the fact. Many warned of the devastating unintended consequences of school closures. Our politicized, polarized culture clouded the judgement of our education leaders when it really counted.
The “expert” class is nothing special in intelligence. If anything this is a clarion call to the general masses of the US to stop assuming the “experts” know something. You can use the same search engines as they do to learn facts, and together we far, far outstrip the intelligence of all the experts put together.
The desired reset was achieved; we have reset our expectations regarding truth, decency, and the care of children. In an amoral world the happiness, the health, and the life of a child only carries the importance we are told to attach to it. To change that, we would have to stand against the tide. History will remember those who did and those who did not.
Joy can be contagious. And those of us who have fought against what felt like the world in the past 3 years need some joy as we continue to advocate for not just our kids, but all of them. And for many moms across the country, covid was a line in the sand. They will not let it happen again. They will be vigilant in fighting for normalcy for their children that they never realized before had been at risk.
Given that the emergency is officially over, and the shots have proven to be both ineffective and in some cases harmful, now more than ever, SCU must defend the science and ethics behind their refusal to drop them. In the absence of such transparency, we are left to assume that Osofsky, along with SCCMA and SCCPH, must be using SCU students as mere pawns to achieve their unscientific and authoritarian vaccination goals and quotas.
Many universities have abandoned their mission of truth-seeking in favor of promoting social justice and all its quasi-religious trappings. This new mission has infiltrated every level of higher education, even medical schools. With this cultural slide, not only is it wrong to attack fellow student’s or professor’s work, it is wrong to even challenge or debate their ideas entirely. If the work of the professors or students falls in line with the new mission, it becomes insulated from any criticism.
Administrative bloat has many other consequences, amongst which is that many university functions now follow bureaucratic rather than academic logic, ignoring the purely academic benefits to activities and focusing instead on finding and privileging reasons for the bureaucracy’s own existence. This leads to a perennial search for problems that can be exaggerated and turned into a justification for more administration (e.g., ‘Is there a problem I can pretend to solve by creating an additional compliance problem?’).
In our unhinged pursuit of a covid-free fantasyland, we wreaked untold and immeasurable havoc on the entire higher education ecosystem. Whether this is reversible remains to be seen. But for the damage not to be permanent, we must at the very least resolve never to do it again. Another round of campus closures like the last one will likely permanently destroy higher ed as we know it.
Could all this pain have been prevented if campuses had just reopened fully in the fall of 2020? Perhaps not—but much of it could have. At worst, we would have continued our gradual downhill roll toward the 2026 cliff, giving legislators and administrators plenty of time to prepare.
