Coronavirus: Back to school, a lesson in chaos

Probably the most pressing issue facing harassed parents during the coronavirus lockdown is how to handle the children who are normally at school while trying to do their own work online.

The chaos extends from parents trying to supervise kindergarten online for kids who can’t yet read, to older kids doing Zoom lessons while still in bed, taking cooking classes in the kitchen and having meltdowns over maths assignments that their parents can’t decipher. Forgotten in all this are the teachers at home who are trying to teach their classes while supervising their own children. Any household with young children today is a cross between a scene from Kindergarten Cop and Home Alone, and the bored, recalcitrant 16-year-old is plotting a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Naturally, parents want a return to normal programming, as do many teachers, but teachers’ unions, especially in Victoria, seem to be dragging the chain, and ideological cracks are emerging within the feel-good consensus we all had at the beginning of this emergency over schooling.

However, the unions have a point. Taking a refreshing break from their vociferous bolstering of Victoria’s crazy psychosocial agendas, teachers’ unions seemingly for once are looking to the health and welfare of their members. That is supposed to be their primary concern, along with the welfare of the children being taught. Having children return to school now does seem to contradict the principle of social distancing we have had drummed into us as the most important factor in containing the virus.

So why send NSW children, who we are told could be asymptomatic carriers, into a classroom of 30 all day, returning to their families on public transport, when some footballers (many of whom aren’t much older physically or mentally than schoolkids) are being castigated for contravening social distancing? Meanwhile the grown-ups of NSW can’t even go bush.

Of course, in the people’s socialist state of Victoria you can’t play golf, fish or even camp in the Alpine National Park (another seemingly coronavirus-free zone), but it has to be admitted that, draconian though most of Daniel Andrews’s directives have been, at least the ban on children returning to school for this term is consistent with his other edicts.

It seems logical that if the lockdown can be eased for NSW schoolkids in their teens, why not for those teaching them and their relatives and their friends? What is the logic of easing restrictions for schoolchildren in NSW while continuing many other bans? Is the back-to-school policy favoured by the federal government and NSW based on physical health, or psychology, or simply because parents are fed up?

This lack of clarity and consistency means the back-to-school directive is being weaponised by the left and the right, giving the lie to the idea that the emergency means we are united even across all ideological boundaries.

The latest sally in this sparring was a series of commissioned research reports released by the federal Department of Education, Skills and Employment on the ill effects of the current “home school” situation, reported by this newspaper on Tuesday. Bleak headlines such as “School lesson: bans hurt kids” were enough to make any confused, conscientious parent puke, heightening already stratospheric levels of anxiety. Unfortunately, there is no nuance in the words “home schooling”, but then nuance is not a tactic often employed in ideological warfare.

The research needed to be read a little more closely; it was about the emergency situation and the effect on children from poorer households. What most children are experiencing is not really home schooling. It is remote learning from school, with the school setting the curriculum.

The difference is important because real home schooling is guided by parents, and in Australia it is fairly controlled. Surprisingly for people who think it is just for the children of religious nuts and superannuated New Agers, home schooling is growing across the Western world, largely in response to dissatisfaction with institutionalised education.

It grows from the philosophical foundation of education, which is that it is parents’ main duty, right and prerogative — not the state’s — to educate their children. Surprisingly, contrary to the idea that they are backward, home-schooled children are academically more advanced than their peers, as all the research from the US and Australia, including the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy results, indicates. Nor are they any more or less socially disadvantaged, depending on how much effort their parents make to involve them in outside activities.

What is going on now, which one expert from the Australian Council for Educational Research calls “emergency online teaching”, is not always successful, especially for young children, and for children who come from disadvantaged circumstances that don’t allow children to learn at home.

However, for children living in good stable homes with reasonably involved parents, the academic outcome after this will probably be neutral. In fact, some families may have enjoyed it. Some experts also have suggested that another good outcome of this emergency is that high schools, in particular, may position themselves to have more and better online teaching capacity, as have most universities.

However, the biggest problem with a blanket back-to-school directive from the federal government is that it doesn’t seem to align with other precautions.

So rather than using the seeming inadequacies of home schooling as a stick to bash the unions, perhaps we should be querying the rationale behind this and other directives since we are still vulnerable to a second spike in infection rates — as seems to have happened just this week in Germany.