Our damaging demand for sterility causes schools to close
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
It’s pretty painful when your local elementary school or middle school shuts down, forcing your child to change schools and maybe travel much farther away. This is increasingly the norm these days thanks to two related phenomena: the baby bust that began in 2008 and the 2020-2021 COVID-related school closures.
I’ll explain how those two are related in a bit. First, let’s look at the schools consolidating due to low and falling enrollment.
UP FOR DEBATE: TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND 2024 GOP HOPEFULS’ STANCE ON ELECTIONS
“Concerns over school closures in Rhode Island are being sped up by a rapid drop in public school students,” local TV station WJAR reports.
“The state has 17,000 fewer students enrolled in public schools than it did in 1999.
“Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green said it’s a trend they have been watching closely.
“’School districts may have to get smaller,’ she said. ‘It’s something that we are all grappling with, every single state.’“
Some of the examples from Rhode Island are startling.
“Warwick closed two schools to consolidate in 2016. Since then, enrollment has fallen another 10%.” From 1998 to today, school enrollment in Warwick is down by 33%. In Providence, enrollment is down more than 20%.
The simple explanation for this, offered by the WJAR story, is the low and falling birthrates. Rhode Island has had fewer babies almost every year since 2005 (which is a bit earlier than the national baby bust began). From 13,000 births in 2005, the state was nearly down to 10,000 even before the pandemic.
Eighteen years of fewer and fewer births means many fewer potential students for the public schools in every grade K-12. It also means that each grade is generally smaller than the one above it. There’s no promise of this trend reversing in the future.
But there’s another factor in the declining enrollment in public schools, both in Rhode Island and nationally: Parents pulled their children from public schools that refused to reopen their doors in September 2020, and that required their children to wear masks into 2022, and that otherwise diminished learning and interaction for years.
So how are our baby bust and our COVID overreactions related?
They are rooted in the same societal sickness: an excessive desire for sterility.
The birth control pill is an obvious contributor to our baby bust, not merely because it allows women to avoid unwanted pregnancies but because after a generation, it set a tone in the culture that we can and should make our lives neat and tidy, without intrusions from other people and free from the “tyranny of [our] own biology,” as some put it.
Biology is the enemy. Chemistry is the solution.
This was the same mindset that dominated during COVID. The actual virus was something of a stand-in for the alive. Humans, and particularly children, were considered merely as “vectors.” We sprayed down every surface with Lysol long after we knew it didn’t help, almost as a religious cleansing ritual.
This belief in an anti-septic world is not conducive to children, who make life messy both literally and metaphorically.
Our mask mania, social distancing, and Lysol theater were of a piece with our baby bust: a fear of the alive. The result is that we have less life around us.