This week’s episode is going to be about re-opening schools, but I wanted to make a comment on that before the episode released.
The country of Bolivia has straight-up canceled its school year. It’s just – POOF – gone. They want to contain the virus and they say most of their kids don’t have the internet at home so remote learning isn’t an option so they’ve just shut the whole thing down.
This is illustrative of just how far the reverberations of the coronavirus are going to be felt for years to come. Kids are going to suffer in so many ways, and I’m not sure there are good solutions. There is going to be an education gap, and therefore, an innovation gap in the coming years because kids missed whole sections of schooling worldwide. And that will be exacerbated by the wealth-and-opportunity gap.
But the flipside is people dying. Kids and parents dying. If we force kids into crowded schools the virus WILL spread and people will suffer.
In America we have ways of avoiding what Bolivia is having to do. If we wanted to, we could make sure kids have access to the internet. If we wanted to. But that would mean funding our schools and e-infrastructure. And right now we’d rather pack the kids into crowded buildings where we know the virus will be running rampant than give schools the money they need to address this issue head on.
But, yeah, we’re the shining city on a hill.
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