Remote Learning is a Disaster for Young Children — Here’s the Real Question to Ask

Let’s flatten that curve

Thought experiment:

If you had to come up with a curriculum that would result in a generation of obedient, uncritical, rule following zombies, what would it look like?

Maybe… 4–6 hours of zoom calls a day where the main topic is almost always “how to behave on a zoom call.” That way, the lesson is to obey, be quiet, and always, always look at the screen.

Of course, screen time is vital to undermining the formation of children into happy, healthy, productive adults. Don’t want our future generations to be motivated by anything except for obedience and direct dictates from broadcasted official authority, do we?

How about remove all in-person socialization so that children don’t learn how to engage, interact and work with others? No… conversation and interaction needs to happen within the narrow confines of a supervised platform.

OOOH when kids aren’t on the screen, you could cut children loose to do make-work assignments they don’t really need to turn in, and that don’t actually teach them anything anyway. No accountability or meaningful work to focus on makes children quickly realize the futility of education.

When in doubt: more screen time is always a good answer. If a child is struggling to read, how about some one on one tutoring — through zoom of course? Or if your kid is tired of schoolwork, just let them surf YouTube or watch Netflix for a few hours in between zoom calls.

In all, we should definitely ignore the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics when they say: “the AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”

Designed to Fail?

There is no question that online learning is not nearly as effective as in-person learning. There’s also little debate among childhood development experts that more screen time = worse outcomes for children in almost any metric you’d care to mention.

The only debate we really have to contend with is whether we think the annihilation of education in this country is an accident or an…