Maybe the secular teachers unions believe it’s the grace of God. If not, they need to explain why Catholic schools are open and managing COVID-19 just fine while they insist on keeping government schools closed. They could also explain how it is that supermarket workers can interact with hundreds of strangers daily, but government school teachers can’t be in a classroom with a few dozen kids.
Addressing the Catholic corona conquest Monday, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn writes that since “the Covid-19 outbreak, Catholic-school administrators have moved heaven and earth to keep their classrooms open.”
“‘The science is clear that there is no substitute for in-person learning, especially for poor and minority children most at danger of falling behind,’ says Tom Carroll, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Archdiocese of Boston,” McGurn also reports. “Across the nation, the Catholic school approach is to stay open wherever we are allowed.”
This, do note, just gives teachers unions another reason to resent Catholic schools, because the latter “prove you can keep classrooms open while keeping Covid-19 at bay,” McGurn points out.
But the unions should be the ones resented. For while I believe in God’s grace, this Catholic “miracle” has a very worldly explanation.
Approximately 107 Catholic schools nationwide closed permanently during the early days of the lockdowns for financial reasons, according to McGurn. For one thing, unlike government schools, private institutions such as Catholic ones only make money if they’re actually operating. No work, no pay.
Then there’s another reality: The China virus just isn’t as deadly as COVID panic porn portrays — and children are hardly imperiled by it at all.
In fact, according to Centers for Disease Control data, even those aged 50 to 69 who contract SARS-CoV-2 have a 99.5-percent survival rate. If you’re 20 to 49, the figure is 99.98 percent. And children?
Those 19 and under have a survival rate of 99.997 percent.
In other words, the flu is deadlier to them. This, mind you, is precisely what studies — such as one out of Newcastle University in London — show, too.
Moreover, there’s also research showing that asymptomatic spread of the China virus is rare to nonexistent and claims that this is never truer than with children. In fact, a University of Vermont study last year found that kids “don’t transmit COVID-19.”
There are contrary claims, too, of course. But that’s not really the point. Rather, if supermarket workers, medical personnel, police — a cop I know told me months ago that half the officers at his station contracted the virus (all were fine) — and so many other Americans can do their jobs and interact with the public, why can’t teachers? They can, of course. Too many just don’t want to and don’t have to, because we pay them, anyway.
There is some good news here. “Once moms and dads realized that the Catholic schools left standing were staying open through the pandemic, they began moving children out of public school” and sometimes into Catholic ones, McGurn also informs.
Thus has the China virus also “heightened awareness that too many kids are held in education limbo by public-school systems that cannot put their students first because they are hostage to the unions,” McGurn further tells us, tweeting the below.
Yet two things should be noted about the above. First, we again see the bastardization of language. George Washington was a hero. Audie Murphy was a hero. John Paul Jones was a hero. In contrast, my father was captured in battle and was a prisoner of war in Germany during WWII, yet would’ve laughed if you’d suggested he was a hero.
Likewise, as much as we should appreciate police, firemen, and medical workers, you’re not a “hero” simply for doing your job. That’s called something else: having a sense of duty.
Portraying the obligation of doing one’s duty as “heroism” — which implies action above and beyond the call of duty — makes it less likely that people will do their duty.
The second point about the tweet photo is that the poor children are saddled with something just short of Darth Vader’s helmet (a mask and face shield). This may be obligatory in today’s litigious world and accords with COVID Ritual, but what about the psychological and physical effects? Is it healthful continually inhaling your own CO2?
I’d suggest that thus burdening kids is unnecessary and, therefore, child abuse. Let the little ones breathe.
All this said, government schools’ closure also has a little mentioned upside: They’re less effective at teaching.
And since what they’re teaching is now largely left-wing propaganda, this isn’t always a bad thing.
