The school of COVIDism strikes me as weird, but that’s OK
Timothy P. Carney
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In upstate New York, some parents are sending their children to a private school that sounds absolutely terrible to me.
At the Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca, “since the fall of 2020 through today, those children must be masked during class and on the playground, and have been barred from speaking during lunch.”
The Free Press has an article on “The School that Couldn’t Quit COVID.”
One parent comments, “I could tolerate most of the stuff — the teachers in N95s and face shields while standing behind plexiglass barriers, the 12 feet of distance for band members, the ban on singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in class. But I just wanted them to end the outdoor masking.”
There’s a lot going on here. There are frustrated parents, there are baffling decisions and nondecisions. There’s the weird role that public health authorities play in our culture. As David Zweig, the article’s author, puts it, it’s a “story of how, when faced with a crisis, many public health authorities — along with regular people and bureaucrats following the authorities’ lead — believed that the more extreme the response to the virus, the more wise and virtuous the policy.”
Sure, but it’s also a story about a private school that is three states and 250 miles away from me.
This school operates according to its own morality, its own worldview, and, frankly, its own religion.
I don’t think COVIDism is good for families or children, but at the same time, I think parents ought to have wide latitude in how they raise their children — and that includes the sort of schools to which parents send their children.
For one thing, we have some ideas about what sort of education works best, but we also know that social science is largely a guessing game. A proper humility ought to leave leeway for a variety of educational approaches.
Secondly, different children learn differently. That means different schools are needed to increase the odds that a given child has access to a school that matches his learning style and needs.
More importantly, different families have different goals when it comes to education. Where I live, in the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., many parents see K-12 education as institutions that ought to get their child into the Ivy League. My wife and I see K-12 education as institutions that will be our partners in our work of trying to form our sons and daughters into men and women of virtue. We’re not trying to get our children into Harvard but into heaven.
Also, different families and different faiths operate according to different values. The morality of the Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca is different from the morality of, say, Grace Christian School down in Florida.
I think we should tolerate the COVIDism of the Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca. And I wish the Left would tolerate the Christianity of Grace Christian School.
The major media have a serious problem with the idea of educational pluralism, though.
Check out the freakout when they found out Grace Christian School, some random tiny school in Florida, operated according to traditional Christian teaching.
Or consider how the New York Times conducted a massive “expose” of Jewish schools that have different values from New York Times reporters and editors.
There’s a huge portion of the media and political class terrified that some child, somewhere, is studying the Psalms instead of prepping for the PSATs.
I can live with parents sending their children to the COVIDist schools. The cultural Left should learn to live with religious schools.