Education Comes Down With Absurdity-Virus.

Christmas seems a long time ago (everything pre-COVID seems a long time ago), but I well remember the dire annual Christmas warnings from lifestyle coaches and mental health experts who flooded the media with warnings about the "depression and anxiety" we we're suffering due to "seasonal stress". These experts fell all over each other giving us tips for "survival". What a relief to find when it all died down in the new year that we had survived. How glad the mental health Cassandras must have been to have a new bundle of warnings to issue, when by late February COVID had raised its crowned (corona) head. 

With the lock-down phase came a whole new raft of stresses: isolation, loneliness, financial anxiety, boredom, fear of the future, fear of coming within six feet of others ... Then, the schools were closed. Now they're partially re-opening, but unfortunately the stress-and-anxiety industry is telling parents (and kids) to be fearful and worried -- because it will be "different". 

Telling kids they can't survive something being different, that they're allergic to change, is a recipe for emotional enfeeblement. Tell the kids they'll be fine, and they will be. The desk is in a different place? The hours of attendance have changed? That's not a reason for mental breakdown. But of course to say this is to reveal uncaring insensitivity toward … whoever. Yet someone has to mention the un-mentionable: stiff spines, bravery under bombing, and so on. (You want stress? Ask a WWII survivor.)

Some of us are old enough to remember when kids always lined up at the school door before entering. (Remember not running in the halls??) Being told by a teacher that something's going to be done differently never used to be a reason for a nervous breakdown. Teachers ran classrooms, and students didn't have a daily meltdown when told what to do. Those meltdowns are more contagious than coronavirus, that's for sure. Just see one and the next kid catches it (copies it).

Sitting in rows of desks at a distance instead of clustering around a table for "group work" was routine in the old days, and kids learned to work independently, not to mention to spell, use a pen, read books and do math. A therapist in the emotionology trade recently announced on CBC radio that schools during the COVID partial re-opening must practice "emotion-focused learning". That is code for no learning, or for learning to whine about feelings like the adults around you do.

It would be more reassuring for students to look outside themselves, to study a subject other than "feelings". How about … Geography! Learning where mountains and oceans are, and learning the capitals of ten countries a day. Or history! Memorize the kings and queens of England since 1066 (okay ... of Israel, India, Morocco or whatever ethnic place you favour). Learn how many moons Saturn has, how many substances appear in the Table of Elements (and what an element even is …).

The post-pandemic "new normal" in Education is to avoid the "old normal" of disinterested knowledge. There was already fear that knowing stuff is a privileged, elitist and colonialist affectation that marginalizes those who need to tend to Self due to stress and anxiety. If you shrug and turn your mind to impersonal study, well then you're just stigmatizing … someone.

Whether new or old, the word "normal" comes from "norm", a geometrical term for an exact angle, such as a draughtsman needs to know. A right angle is the norm because there is only one measurably correct right angle. The word "correct" is linked to rectitude of course, and implies standards as well as exactitude, and is therefore not a concept people feel comfortable with. It's not "emotion-focused" or marginalization-concerned. (Interestingly, teachers used to graduate from what was called "Normal School", meaning a college upholding established standards in skills and knowledge.)

But sarcasm aside, it would be helpful for kids to focus on math as something inarguable, measurable and reliable. If they're bobbing around on the sea of adult emotionology, something impersonal and outside self could be a life-raft. They won't be scared of germs, of school, of every minor change in routine, if we don't tell them they should be.