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.
The results we were promised from increased tech adoption, always available learning content, and a device for every child has turned out to be not much more than a successful marketing campaign. One where tech corporations cashed in, government overspent taxpayer money, and once again, the children were let down.
Traditionally, college commencement addresses are corny or grandiose exhortations for grads to devote their lives to serving others. But this year, commencement speakers should show self-awareness and focus on how badly they and their peers have failed their students and an entire generation of young people during the past 38 months. They need to apologize profusely, specifically and at length.
College Administrators Need to Admit Wrongdoing and Beg Forgiveness Read More
In reality, Weingarten did everything in her power to keep schools shuttered; she just pretended that she wanted them open. She had a direct line to Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, and interjected impossible-to-meet guidelines about what was necessary to re-open schools “safely.” Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in May 2021 revealed that the AFT lobbied the CDC and suggested language for the agency’s federal reopening guidance.
The Truth about Randi Weingarten and the School Closures Read More
This is a story of an author who promoted COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adolescents while failing to disclose significant competing interests (e.g., his holding of an unrestricted research grant from Pfizer). This is also a story of a failure of the author’s publisher Nature Reviews Cardiology to enforce Nature Portfolio’s declaration-of-competing-interests policy.
Just as the state cannot trust the weighty job of parenting to parents, it cannot trust the job of childcare to childcare providers. They will therefore have to be subjected to strict protocols, as befits a good bureaucracy. And those protocols will be designed by experts who have scientifically determined which conditioning techniques lead to the best adapted little New Citizen.
Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State? Read More
For the past three years, students at the University of Chicago have been exposing the facade without intimidation or fear, and they just keep raising the bar. One week from today, students will be hosting academic and industry leaders to discuss “Academia’s COVID Failures”, and you cannot miss the livestream of this event.
At the time of this writing, school closures are still occurring, albeit much rarer than last year. I truly hope we can one day put politics aside and do what’s right for our future and for our kids.
COVID-19 landed in an impoverished information ecology – especially in academic institutions – where increasingly all forms of information and arguments are vetted through ideological lines. In other words, arguments are measured against an always moving line of demarcation based on their suspected rootedness in simplistic political camps.
A Crumbling Regime: Lessons for the Social Sciences and Humanities Read More
So, yes, I have removed myself from the New-Agey circle of desks in the middle of the classroom and gone back to the lectern—and it feels good. It’s where I belong. believe, in the long run, my students will benefit, too, as over time I wean them from the spoon-feeding we have all been doing during the pandemic.
The tranquil tropical town which has restarted whipping kids is Puducherry (India): “H3N2 outbreak: This UT shuts schools from 16-24 March.” In a normal world, people should not ask for evidence to not whip kids to ostensibly prevent future tempests. Regardless, there is a mountain of scientific evidence that whipping kids has no effect on tempests.
As opposed to fifty years ago, today’s protesting students do not exhibit an instinctive aversion to authority. With each controversy, they join the country’s most powerful forces in calling for more censorship, fewer civil liberties, and less tolerance for dissenting viewpoints.
