I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic
The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight
The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal
The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.
And the teachers unions will be held responsible for their irrational demands and stonewalling, and I am not sure they will survive the public reckoning

I am confident in these predictions. Screenshot it.
I will be more specific. There will be just a single 60 minutes episode where just 4 kids describe the abuse they were subjected too, while trapped with the abuser, and public schools refused to open, in a place with low covid positivity, & every American's blood will boil over
I am willing to bet one kid will say
"no one came to help me"

and the show will talk about how the case positivity rate was low, and quote some repentent person, and the public sentiment will shift overnight
Someone will say "it made no sense to close these schools" "If we had opened them, this might not have happened"

And it will be like the Iraq war.
Many will be on the wrong side of history.
You only support closed schools
You only think it is reasonable
Because of availability bias
When that is broken, your spirit will break

More from Education

Last month I presented seven sentences in seven different languages, all written in a form of the Chinese-character script. The challenge was to identify the languages and, if possible, provide a


Here again are those seven sentences:

1) 他的剑从船上掉到河里去
2) 於世𡗉番𧡊哭唭𢆥尼歲㐌外四𨑮
3) 入良沙寢矣見昆腳烏伊四是良羅
4) 佢而家喺邊喥呀
5) 夜久毛多都伊豆毛夜幣賀岐都麻碁微爾夜幣賀岐都久流曾能夜幣賀岐袁
6) 其劍自舟中墜於水
7) 今天愛晚特語兔吃二魚佛午飯

Six of those seven sentences are historically attested. One is not: I invented #7. I’m going to dive into an exploration of that seventh sentence in today’s thread.

Sentence #7 is an English-language sentence written sinographically — that is, using graphs that originate in the Chinese script. I didn’t do this for fun (even though it is fun), or as a proposal for a new way to write


I did it as a thought experiment. Why? Because thinking about how the modern Chinese script might be adapted to write modern English can give us valuable insights into historical instances of script borrowing, like those that took place centuries ago in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

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