RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/what-school-shutdowns-have-wrought

Though Covid-related restrictions are easing across the country, fewer than half of America’s students are back in school full-time, according to Burbio, a website tracking school reopenings. A look at the national map shows that the most populous state, California, is also the most locked down, while the third-most populous, Florida, is almost completely back to normal. In October 2020, Brown University reported that politics and teachers’ union strength best explain how school boards approached reopening. In a September 2020 study, researchers Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis found that school districts in places with strong teachers’ unions were much less likely to offer full-time, in-person instruction in the fall.

In the early days of the lockdowns, medical experts were mixed on reopening schools, but a solid consensus now exists in favor of doing so. Last month, the CDC urged the nation’s elementary and secondary schools to admit students for in-person instruction as soon as possible. Around the same time, the New York Times “asked 175 pediatric disease experts if it was safe enough to open school.” The experts, mostly pediatricians focusing on public health, “largely agreed that it was safe enough for schools to be open to elementary students for full-time and in-person instruction now. Some said that this was true even in communities where Covid-19 infections were widespread, as long as basic safety measures were taken.” Reopening doesn’t lead to increased cases in a community, and closing classrooms “should be a last resort,” according to a March 11 analysis of more than 130 studies by AEI’s John Bailey.

The science is also clear that remote learning has been a disaster for children. A study by FAIR Health, a company that “possesses the nation’s largest collection of private healthcare claims data,” reveals that young people are suffering profoundly. Comparing August 2019 with August 2020 reveals an almost 334 percent increase in intentional self-harm claims in the Northeast for 13- to 18-year-olds. Drug overdoses more than doubled from April 2019 to April 2020 for the same age cohort. From spring 2020 to November 2020, obsessive-compulsive disorder and tic disorders increased for six- to 12-year-olds.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/16/whatever-happened-to-reading-n1433000

I’ve been thinking lately about the pervasive decline in reading, a phenomenon I noticed as a college prof over many years of teaching, and which now seems to have become even more prevalent. These reflections were spurred by two films which I’ve recently re-watched, the rather gruesome three-part Hannibal series starring the inimitable Anthony Hopkins, and the ever-delightful six-episode Oliver’s Travels featuring a charming performance from Alan Bates.*

What struck me about the Hannibal trilogy was the surname Lecter, a homonym for the word “lector” from the Latin for “reader,” and which gives us the common word “lecture.” Hannibal the Cannibal is a reader of sorts, a rather voracious one. A forensic psychotherapist by profession, he is deeply educated, can lecture on Renaissance art and history and recite Dante in the original, loves and understands music, knows precisely how to detect life histories from a modicum of cues—and devours people as if they were texts, relishing choice passages.

Oliver, for his part, is an inveterate wordsmith, an anagram maestro, a crossword buff, an incorrigible punster and an excellent scholar who has been “rendered redundant” as a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of the Rhondda Valley in Wales, which has revised its curriculum to reflect “market strategy.” What is now important is “accessing information,” whereas “history,” as Oliver quips, “has become a thing of the past.” The university has become a vast computer lab and erudition is now regarded as quaint and obsolete. There is no place any longer for a playful and richly-stocked mind like Oliver’s. One surveys printouts rather than reads Aristotle.

I was intrigued by these productions in part because each in its different way had something to do with the problem of reading, of “ingesting” knowledge, of “devouring” a complex world as if it were a book, of scholarship in a world dedicated to markets, mere information processing and the devaluation of wit (both Hannibal and Oliver evince a lively capacity for witty utterance). It is a world obsessed with droids rather than people, with mediocrity rather than meritocracy, with surfaces rather than depths, and with artificial intelligence rather than real intelligence. The director of the Hannibal films, Ridley Scott, dealt with the concept of artificial intelligence in Blade Runner, whose replicant anti-hero assumes a human quality only at the end with his “tears in the rain” speech. It is no accident that a leading software system is called “Android.” Novelist Alan Plater’s and director Giles Foster’s Oliver’s Travels gestures toward the great satirist Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and to the comic Restoration dramatist George Farquhar, who figures waggishly in the plot.