school is, at best, maybe 50% of what we really are expecting children to learn during their schooling.

How to make friends, find your role in a complex social structure, emotionally deal with annoying people, manage your own time and schedule, accomplish a task with a group, and probably most importantly, develop your personal interests through extracurricular activities are all things that stick with you long after you've forgotten how to diagram a sentence. Sure, we can teach trigonometry or review the Red Badge of Courage via distance learning. But what about the life skills we learn by being on a sports team, or participating in the school theater program, or doing a chemistry lab with a partner?

We already complain about the efficacy of our education system. Now we're cutting what we do have off at the knees.


FWIW, I'm not an advocate for the concept that C-19 is all rubbish and let's just get back to normal. It is a big deal and we need to take countermeasures. All I'm advocating is that we understand the true and full cost of the countermeasures we come up with so we can make the informed risk/benefit decision.