What is a School?

Of course, this may be because they think online schooling or homework will be an adequate substitute for in-person schooling, and assume that by default those will be assigned to make up for lost in-class time.

[I think school is highly suboptimal and quite possibly net negative compared to not having mandatory or subsidized schooling, but I think the inference Zvi is trying to draw here is shaky.]

The concern that I have heard literally zero people mention is that closing the schools will prevent children from learning.

I don't know if a counterexample from Finland will count as one for your purposes, but for what it's worth, a notable Finnish politician wrote yesterday:

Jos näillä tiedoilla joutuisin päättämään, en sulkisi kouluja, koska lyhytaikainen sulkeminen ei hyödytä mitään ja pitkäaikainen vaarantaa lasten oppimisen. Puoli vuotta lyhempi peruskoulu? Ihan oikeasti?

Which roughly translates as:

If I had to make the decision given what we currently know, I wouldn't close the schools. A short-term closure wouldn't bring any benefit, and a long-term closure would endanger the children's learning. Making elementary school half a year shorter? Are you kidding me?

We see the same type of issue with downsizing military or even government. What is the military? Where do the jobs go, especially for all the 15 years in service but never really advanced? What about the training? What about all the communities served by the bases? Little of that has anything to do with the primary role of a military for society.

There are some questions to be asked but many actually I think shine a light on many of the unintended consequences of things.

I suspect the lack of learning is primarily due to the expectations set in the school closures. Here in Seattle they announced schools would only be closed until April 24. So that is a few weeks before and after the already schedule Spring Break. Not a closure for the rest of the school year, which is the more likely reality.

I wonder what happens to all the High School seniors this year. Will the governors just give them a bye and graduate them? How about the universities if the lock downs don’t end by late August? How many freshman would show up for online orientation, paying tens of thousands of dollars for an accredited MOOC vs. deferring freshman year to January or Fall 2021?

Teaching online is way harder than most people think. I taught a hybrid Executive MBA for years and the 1 hour weekly online sessions were way harder to make useful and to teach than the six hour long in-person days once per month. My wife teaches 100% online, fully asynchronous classes at a local college and it took her many years to prep and tune her classes to make them work for all of the various learning styles.

Given that, expect a lot more talk about whether the move to online classes is effective in a month, once most teachers fail at making the transition and with that, the high achieving students complaining.