It is striking that none of the CDC or WHO's pandemic control recommendations prior to 2020 included extended school closures. - Dr. Shamik Dasgupta
It was five years ago this month that most of the country shut down for what turned out to be a very long time.
For me, everything shut down over spring break. I was toward the end of my third year in my PhD years at Texas A&M, and everyone was talking about how school might be online-only for two to three weeks.
That was unimaginable at the time. Little did we know.
My biggest challenge at first was learning to teach formal logic through a screen, with all its symbols and argument structures that formerly went on a whiteboard.
Graduate students play a unique role in higher ed, taking on the part of both student and educator while in a program. So I got to see both sides of the education system during the extended school closures.
The hallway conversations, lunches, office conversations, and in-person special lectures all stopped. I realized quickly that those social interactions were a main source of ideas and motivation for my writing and research.
Impromptu, organic conversations now had to be artificially scheduled and mediated by a flat screen.
As an instructor, I was trying to figure out how to teach logic and philosophy courses in this new digital-based world. There was no instruction manual on how to do deal with a wall of mute, black screens in place of expressive, responsive faces. No precedented guidelines for the deluge of exception requests because of tech problems, or from sickness, or a death in the family.
But I’m convinced the difficulties we faced at the college level paled in comparison to the difficulties that middle school and high school students faced.
Every eight weeks, dozens of my ethics students open up about how the extended school closures continue to impact their lives.
Each semester, I have my ethics students read an article called, “School in the Time of COVID” by Shamik Dasgupta, Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley (and self-proclaimed progressive).
I include his article in an ethics course because, as I tell the students in class, I think it would be weird to ignore the ethical issues surrounding the biggest event of the students’ lifetime.
The article is well-argued and well-written, and we go through its claims and arguments with an eye for exposition and objections. We work through Dasgupta’s article not to seek agreement with every claim, or his conclusion, but to critically examine the ethical dimensions that are mentioned throughout the paper.
It surprises, pleases, and concerns me every time I teach the article, when inevitably the biggest takeaway the students express is simply having a space to openly discuss the extended school lockdowns.
Everyone has a COVID story.
But for most students, no one has checked in on them to see specifically how that era-defining period still shapes their lives.
Older generations look at the younger generation and the pervasive use of phones and screens and (rightly) talk about the social and psychological downsides. And many assume that kids consciously, and fully informed, weigh all the pros and cons and intentionally prefer constant screen use to real world engagement.
But from what I’m hearing in class, that’s not the way to think about what's going on.
Students know that their screen use is out of control.
They know that they should go socialize in person rather than in the digital world of texts or video games.
They know they should do the things that are healthy for them, but as they say, it’s just easier to default to the digital. And why is the digital world their default?
Extended school closures.
For months and months, learning took place in the digital world. Socializing took place in the digital world.
Interacting with others in any way outside their living space took place in the digital world.
Habits were formed and solidified over the course of a year or more.
The current tragedy is that 1) the younger generation who experienced the lockdowns as teens know what’s healthy for them, and 2) they also know they have been habituated to form personal and social patterns that war against their well-being.
They have no idea how to make sense of the disconnect between their stated preferences and their revealed preferences.
Screen use is this generation’s smoking, it’s just more subtle and invisible.
So I now think of the pervasive use of screens as in part a product of forming bad digital-based habits over a long period of time, which makes good, real world-based habits far more difficult to form.
For younger students, defaulting to the natural, real world is like building an exercise habit like running or going to the gym. They know they should, and that it’s good for them, but it’s hard.
There have been plenty of publicized effects of the COVID era, but to me the scariest ones are these subtle and invisible ones that make it so difficult for them to form good habits and character.
To take one small but significant example: instead of walking into a class where I have to tell the students to stop talking so I can teach (a pre-2020 problem), I walk into the sound of mass scrolling: dead silence from zombied eyes.
The lockdown era cost everyone financially, physically, and politically.
I’m convinced we need to be talking more transparently across generations about the ethics of what it cost us mentally, socially, and spiritually.
Next week I talk to philosopher Dr. Gillian Russell about how we should think about logic, her philosophical work on martial arts, her groundbreaking new book defending the view that you cannot get an ought (ethics) from an is (description), and much more.
Until next time.
Jared
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P.S. If interested, you can read the abstract of a Bioethics article that talks about the ethics of preparing for a pandemic written 15 years before COVID in 2005.
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