It’s time politicians stood up to the nonsense from troublemaking teachers’ unions.
Teachers should be clamouring to get back to class, but instead the unions that represent them are throwing obstacles in the way of child education.
They claim to be in fear of their members’ safety and concerned for pupils, even though all international science shows that – in general – kids are not getting or transmitting the virus. To take their position is to defy logic.
It’s scaremongering humbug. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes. Which politician will expose it?
Now that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has announced the return of contact sports – for children and adults – their stance has been revealed for what it is. Unreasonable, self-serving and precious.
It’s either the worst of bureaucracy – putting primadonna procedural correctness before real-life needs – or the scourge of safetyism: unwilling to make any safety trade-offs demanded by moral and practical concerns.
It also comes from the privileged position of being off for months on full pay. Note that while hairdressers, bookies and pubs – who depend on patronage for profit – are begging for loosened restrictions and earlier re-openings, teachers reps are telling us what they can’t do. Are they waiting for a vaccine to agree to going back to work in guaranteed security?
Meanwhile, children are suffering. Education is not a privilege, it is a human right; and written into the Irish Constitution. It is vital to child socialisation, development and happiness.
Only agreeing to school settings with strict social distancing, and on a part-time basis, is worse than useless for parents and kids, who rely on the routine.
Varadkar’s common-sense message that schools reopening was one of the “safest things we can do” and “bespoke” solutions could be made for children should have been great news for teachers. But the self-victimising unions chose instead to see it as a solution in search of a problem.
We had to shut down schools at the panic stage of the pandemic. We know now that overall, children are safer in school, than to remain at home.
The reopening of schools across 22 European countries has not led to any significant increase in coronavirus infections among children, parents or staff. Sweden never shut the school gates and it had no increase throughout the worst of Covid-19.
Anyone who argues the risk of the virus warrants continued shut-down of education is not in full possession of the facts.
This is why the Children’s Rights Alliance and the National Parents’ Council have both made public calls for schools’ timely and full return.
If there was a real fear, would these groups advocate it? They know that the danger lies in not doing it. The economic and social fallout is more of a risk to children’s futures than the virus is to them.
Their needs are a priority in any fair and functioning society.
This is a pandemic. We can’t beat it – we must learn to live with it. We have all taken sacrifice and risk. Parents have more than played their part. The social contract demands now that teachers play theirs.
Let’s hear our elected representatives come out and say that.
