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0 pointsmissedthecue1y ago0 comments

It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.

Of course, there are some incentives at play here. The people voicing these opinions are adults, and adults benefit both when their children are taken away to free daycare... err i mean school all day, and when they get to enjoy the flexibility of home office. This set of incentives could create the confusing combination of beliefs above.

But I also think that maybe it's the sample group. Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates. And similarly, a lot of adults truly do get a lot more work done from their laptop at home. My suspicion is that technical people like those in my social circle and here on HN are both the types that would have excelled at remote schooling, and also those that do well working as hermits in a remote home office environment. There's just a huge blindspot that the other 90% of the population is handling things really badly.

The other 90% of kids are reading 3 grade levels behind, and the other 90% of coworkers are doing an hour of work per day, going to the shopping mall at 10am and the dog park at 2, and doing it all with low levels of team cooperation that, just like with a teacher and her remote 5th graders, no level of management or coaching is going to materially improve.

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dumbledoren1y ago

> It is very interesting to me that in my social/professional circle, and indeed here on HN, remote schooling during covid is practically universally seen as a massive failure resulting in serious consequences, yet remote work is a huge success and it's an outrage and borderline human rights violation whenever it's reduced or taken away.

Because children are not adults. They don't have the attention span and concentration skills to focus on something for 8 hours a day. Evolutionarily so - the job of children is to play, discover and learn. The job of adults is to concentrate and run the show.

Even the existing schooling system that crams kids into classrooms and gets them to look at a board to learn things is contrary to human evolution actually. Its the product of the early education system that developed from late medieval scholastic religious education practices.

dickersnoodle1y ago

> Not all kids failed disastrously at remote school, some excelled and worked far ahead of their classmates.

My grandson was like this. He was in a "virtual school" pod with three other children and is reading far ahead of his grade level and one of the reasons is that he didn't have to spend a ton of time in the child-management boot camp that a lot of elementary schools tend to be.