It’s a Natural Disaster, Not a Crisis

As we are, so we do;
and as we do, so is it done to us;
we are the builders of our fortunes.
—Emerson

Words matter.  The terms and language we use to describe something color our thoughts and perceptions about it; they impact our expectations and how we feel.  In short, the words we choose to use alter how we experience every aspect of our lives, and nowhere is this truer than in the midst of the current pandemic.  Continuing to call the novel coronavirus a “crisis” rather than acknowledge it for the fire-like natural disaster that it is impacts how we respond both practically and psychologically to the situation, and that has profound long-term consequences for what happens to us as a society and as a species moving forward:  we get through a crisis; we recover from a disaster.  Again, words matter.

Part of the problem with calling COVID-19 a crisis is that the word “crisis” implies something we can simply fix.  Using this term reinforces a false dualism that humans are somehow separate from the so-called “natural” world, and in fact, much of our individual responses—from the extremes of quarantine to cavorting on beaches—have rested on the prevalent assumption in our culture that medical technology will somehow make us fixable in the relatively near future.  In other words, it’s just a matter of time before we get through this and life will get back to normal.

However, as I have reminded my students for years, we are an animal existing in relationship with every other living thing in our environments and that means that by definition anything we do is natural.  As physicist Lee Smolin puts it: we have reached the limits of the usefulness of the idea that we are separate from nature [and] need a new conception in which we and everything we make and do are as natural as the cycles of carbon and oxygen that we emerged from and in which we participate with every breath (p. 79). A skyscraper is no less natural than an ant hill; a cell phone no less natural than the leaf-spears crafted by New Caledonian crows.  All organisms manipulate their environments for their own benefit; we simply have a pre-frontal cortex that enables us to do so at a scale to which no other organism can even come close. 

Yet it is this difference in scale that can cause a kind of hubristic amnesia that only natural disasters seem capable of curing.  With these events, we understand acutely that while we can prepare for a hurricane or earthquake (e.g. by altering how we construct our houses), we cannot control whether, where, or how such things happen.  We know intuitively in these situations that we remain part of the larger natural system, whether we like it or not, and that all we can do when these events happen is to cope and adapt.  In other words, because we can never escape a disaster’s consequences, the only thing we who survive can do is recover from them.

Which is why I think it is so critical that we start referring to the current pandemic as the natural disaster that it is.  As I discussed in my last post, the virus is now an integral part of our reality moving forward, and just as the Black Plague of the Middle Ages altered forever the economies and cultures of Europe and the so-called “Spanish Flu” of 1918 changed the consequent history of the 20^th Century, COVID-19 is going to bring about fundamental adjustments in our society as well.  Just because a disaster is biological in origin rather than geological or meteorological does not make it any less devastating.

And again, words matter.  “Devastating” alters how we understand what is happening right now.  We expect devastation from a natural disaster.  We know from experience that when an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, etc. happens that there will be death and destruction and that what gets rebuilt will be different.  We understand that there will be loss that we cannot prevent, and we grasp that the actuality of such devastation—the simple fact that it will accompany a natural disaster—is out of our control.  We get that when disaster strikes, life will permanently change ever after.

We also know that there will be a need for triage when there is a natural disaster, that we will have to make difficult decisions about the different types of devastation we encounter from such an event and how we will respond to each situation.  Some choices in some disasters are pretty straightforward:  rescue survivors first; clean up the rubble later.  But in the case of biological natural disasters such as the current outbreak, the choices we make can directly impact the types of devastation that occurs because our behaviors have the power to inform how the pathogen spreads.  In other words, we can, to a finite degree, choose which type of devastation happens and the amount of it.

And that brings me back to my primary focus of this project:  education.  Right now, every school from pre-K to college is having to ask themselves the difficult question:  do we open this fall? It is a thorny decision, and it is made all the harder by the disparities and limitations that have become abundantly evident in the drastic switch to nearly universal on-line learning in the past few months. I have already written elsewhere about the impact of the digital divide and the potential economic impact on schools caused by this transition.  But the mounting evidence suggests that on-line learning is breaking down and not adequately replacing what takes place in the classroom—a simple Google search for just the terms “NPR and Education” will bury you in stories ranging from teachers who have not heard from some students for weeks to parents declaring they are simply giving up—and thus the stage is set for potentially the worst “summer slide” in history.

This phenomenon of students during summer break losing some of what they learned the previous school year is well documented, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels, and any veteran teacher knows that he, she, or they will be doing some form of remediating in the fall, usually revisiting some core skill such as reading, math, or critical thinking depending on the child.  But the “slide” can also show tremendous disparity depending on the student population in a school.  For example, Karl Alexander of Johns Hopkins University demonstrated in the early 2000s using reading comprehension scores as a metric that children from both low and high income families learn equally well when in the actual classroom during the school year (with those from low income families in fact outperforming their high income peers by 5.19 points).  However, this same research showed that over the summer months when they were not in the classroom, children from low-income households lost 44.68 more points than those from high-income homes.  You can imagine what that loss is going to look like if we are not back in schools until what some are suggesting could be 2021, and the bottom line is that while being in the physical classroom is value-added for every child’s success, it is absolutely critical for certain segments of our student population.

Nor is it only a prolonged “summer slide” that could set back an entire generation (with some set back significantly more than others!).  The impacts of social distancing and extended school closures are starting to harm our children’s mental health as well.  Reports of depression, stress, and anxiety in young people of all ages are mounting (again, a web search of just NPR will bury you in the data), and the fact that Anya Kamenetz could report on a 5-year old girl claiming “I don’t care if I die” should give us all pause. We already know the strong negative consequences these changes in mental health have on the brain’s ability to learn (see Chapter 3) as well as the challenges the very technology employed in on-line learning presents to the brain’s ability to function properly in the first place (see Chapter 9).  Thus, unless we do something soon about figuring out how to get children back into schools, one of the single greatest devastations of this pandemic will be its impact on the education of an entire generation.  Or as Evan Mandery puts it, “today’s elementary students will be in my college classroom in a decade.  Without immediate action, the resulting gap in educational outcomes will be impossible to repair.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that there is no simple way to address this need to return students to their classrooms that would not result in the devastating simultaneous increase in the number of people dying from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and it is this potential “Sophie’s choice” that is at the heart of the many dilemmas facing us because of this natural disaster.  It is also why we so desperately keep wanting to refer to this pandemic as a crisis and not the catastrophe that it is.  You don’t have to do triage in a crisis; you do not have to make choices such as “Do we devastate our children’s future to save lives or do we devastate some lives to save our children’s future?” And while I do not think the actual choice about children in schools is this binary, I do think wrestling with this (and the many other such decisions facing us) does force us to recognize the disaster character of this pandemic.  There is going to be devastation of some kind or another, and just like with an earthquake or a hurricane, there is nothing we can do to alter that fact.

Furthermore, I think it is time all of us started owning this truth in our decision-making process because until we do, we are not going to be able to make the kinds of trade-offs that triaging the pandemic’s devastation is going to require us to do in order to recover.  Schools remaining closed damages our children, and it risks damaging them increasingly more the longer they remain so.  Therefore, what are we willing to surrender to mitigate that damage? For example, smaller class sizes to accommodate social distancing will require either more teachers, longer days to split grade-levels into shifts, or holding classes on alternating days (all variants of what various European schools have started to do).  The first solution requires taxpayers surrendering more funding; the second requires teachers surrendering more of their time; and the third requires parents surrendering some income.  The alternative is to have normal class sizes in exchange for surrendering a guaranteed increase in the number of deaths. 

Thus, the simple truth is that something is going to have to give to rescue our children from the current situation, and the uncomfortable reality is that it is just not possible to navigate the devastation this pandemic has caused without making these difficult choices.  But unless we start making such choices—especially about the foundation for the future that is education—we will only make the damage and destruction that much worse.  Granted, one of the things that makes this particular natural disaster so challenging to plot a course through is the delay in its impact (we won’t see the consequences of Memorial Day weekend until mid-June at the earliest).  But the new school year is only a few months away, and if we don’t start deciding what our trade-offs will be now, we risk furthering the harm already done from the need to quarantine in place these past several weeks.  Or to quote Evan Mandery again, “the cost of the pandemic in lives lost already is too high to comprehend. If we allow the virus also to claim as victims the students who most depend on our schools to lift them up, the final tally will be truly unbearable.”

References

Ferlazzo, L. (May 13, 2020) We Might Have Gotten Remote Learning Wrong. We Can Still Fix This School Year.  Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2020/05/13/we-might-have-gotten-remote-learning-wrong.html.

Homayoun, A. (2018) Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.

Kamenetz, A. (May 14, 2020) With School Buildings Closed, Children’s Mental Health is Suffering.  NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/14/855641420/with-school-buildings-closed-children-s-mental-health-is-suffering.

Mandery, E. (May 17, 2020) We’re About to Have the Longest Summer Vacation Ever. That’s Going to Be a Problem. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/17/long-summer-students-coronavirus-259201.

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

Merrill, S. (May 8, 2020).  Schools Are Opening Worldwide, Providing a Model for the U.S. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/schools-are-opening-worldwide-providing-model-us.

Smolin, L. (2018) The Philosophy of the Open Future. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 77-102.