New Findings on Pandemic Kids. And What They Really Tell Us
The subtext: If we don’t rescue this generation, they can’t save us.
If they’re not part of the solution…
As they grow older, those kids will be problems, not solutions. They’ll provide work for cops and other first responders, not to mention the dwindling numbers of health-care workers and the growing numbers of prison guards. At least until the overwhelmed system breaks down.
Stress reveals true character, and the stress of this pandemic has exposed the character of whole nations. Canada’s character has not been something to be proud of. We have exploited our “essential” workers, grabbed vaccines needed by poorer countries, and opened schools more to free up parents to go back to work than to teach kids how to function in a world that will never be 2019 again.
Of course we should keep those schools open as safely as we can. But we should also be assigning our best educators to develop new forms of instruction that can adapt to future pandemics, or social disruption — and curriculums that will help the kids adapt as well. They won’t look much like today’s courses in tourism and business management.
Since at least the end of the Second World War, education promised the hope of social mobility to a few working class and racialized children, while ensuring that white kids would have a far better chance to remain at least near the top of the social order. The kids who thrived under this system got us where we are today and are now among those seeking to be the next government of Canada.
How to Future-Proof Canada? Pay Parents!
But they are too few, and too untalented, and too trapped in the past, to get us out of this mess. We need literally all hands on deck, and each pair of hands linked to a healthy, well-educated brain — whether it’s the brain of a Black kid, an Indigenous kid, or a kid who arrived from Afghanistan this week.
Every last child will be either a stumbling block or a stepping stone. If we don’t give all our children resources now to help us, we will have to give them resources later just to minimize the damage they will cause.
We pay a lot of lip service to everything we do for our kids, and we say we work hard to get them a better start in life than we had.
But if we really loved them, we’d work to enable them to take care of us in our wretched old age while they were also saving the planet we’ve ruined. Maybe they’d love us back enough to do so. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/ui/img/ico_fishie.png)
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/09/02/New-Findings-Pandemic-Kids/