Skipping school

Virtual school is doing an amazing job preparing my daughter for adult life in the modern workforce. She wakes up, spends most of the day staring at a screen, then shuts it off with a sigh. Her eyes are bleary, her mind is blank, her expression is dull. Her psyche is uncharacteristically raw and tender. Then she cries, eats dinner, cries a little more for good measure, and goes to sleep so she can wake up and do it all over again the next day. It’s basically an internship for adulthood, if you make the wrong career choice. 

She is six years old. 

Her reading, and her reading comprehension, are far worse now than they were at the start of the school year. She used to wake up early, brush her teeth, get dressed and scarf down breakfast, all on her own, just so she could wait for an hour or more to go to school in the morning. “Is it time yet?!” she would ask. When I picked her up at the end of the day, she would look back wistfully as we walked to the car, as if leaving a golden palace full of enchantment, rather than a brick building full of spilled milk, encouraging posters, and sticky, discarded coats and mittens.

“Don’t worry,” I’d say. “You get to come back tomorrow.” 

Then, one day, tomorrow never came. 

For us, as for everyone else in the world, everything has changed since then. Her best friend left the school district. Her teacher quit just before the beginning of the school year. She has never met most of her teachers. People on a computer keep telling her they care about her, and I believe they mean it, but they are rendered completely helpless by the medium they are forced to use. Because saying something – especially in a pixelated online meeting - is not the same as doing something. Saying “You are cured!” does not make heart disease go away. Saying “Don’t worry!” does not make worry go away. Saying you care is not caring. If saying things were doing things, politicians would not be such heinous figures, because they all pledge to fix the economy and solve all our problems, while they hardly ever do it, even when they earnestly try. 

If you took a scrap of paper and drew a shark on it, it would not pose much of a threat. It would, at the very least, be unlikely to chomp you off at the midsection.

If you scribbled the word “Atom Bomb” on a chalkboard, it is highly – although quantum mechanics suggests that nothing is ever truly impossible – unlikely that it would blow up, sending a fungal cloud high into the sky. 

If you took a piece of paper and printed the words “health insurance” on it, it would not necessarily make going to the doctor affordable. (This, incidentally, is basically what our health insurance is.) 

It is not just the things we say in life that matter, but rather the spaces in between them. We do not love our children because we say “I love you” every day. (Even though we do.) We love them because of the things we do in between the words. We only say it as a boast, or a promise of sorts, like Babe Ruth calling his shot before blasting a home run over the outfield wall. “I love you,” we say, and then we make dinner, practice sight words, apply antiseptic to wounds, and work to explain the strange, alien ways people behave out in a world where people choose, again and again, to waste their finite time being angry and self-righteous while staring at a screen. 

I have no opinion about if and when children should return to school, because I cannot quantify the suffering that school closures are causing versus the suffering caused by COVID-19. Perhaps someone can, but I am surely not that clever or wise, and I cannot see the future. I know that forcing young children to wear masks and prohibiting hugs or any real affection of any kind would probably do even more damage than online first grade is currently doing, so I am not about to start going around telling people that going back to school is the right answer, either. 

I simply have no answers, so I honestly don’t even think about it too much. I have filed the question of what to do about public education away with other impossible ideas, like the finality of death, the philosophy of Derrida, and the very concept of gluten-free bread. 

What is odd, of course, is watching a six-year-old girl living out her days like some soulless, middle-aged office drone. Her bouncing curls and her bright brown eyes, so full of wonder until September, now simply belie the fact that she is living the kind of life that leads to depression, obesity, back pain and very pointless and misguided howling on social media. It is like when you put a suit jacket on a toddler. It looks wrong and seems to cloak the magic right out of her. 

At the end of school yesterday, she broke down yet again, crying and pressing her wet, red face against my shirt. I figure a father’s shirt should be judged primarily on its ability to absorb tears, boogers, blood and various sauces. This shirt was a good one. 

“Dad,” she said. “I don’t like being on a computer all day.” 

“I know,” I said.

“It gives me a headache,” she said. 

“I know,” I said. 

“I miss my friends,” she said. 

“I know,” I said. 

Beyond that, I felt I had little to offer. 

What I don’t have the heart to tell her, of course, is that, unless she steps very carefully on her path through life, this will be her experience from now until the day she takes her last breath. Because this is the experience of MOST people in the developed world. The vast majority of Americans spend all day on a screen, going through the motions, moving around numbers or words, and silently praying for the day to end, so they can lug their flattened souls to bed and slip away, for a few hours, from a world that is not real or meaningful, anyway. 

They are the new Willy Lomans, these sad, weary people. And while I don’t want to watch my daughter go through this now, perhaps the awful, soul-crushing experience of online first grade will be just the thing to make her tread carefully on her way through life. Perhaps all my silly sayings and monologues about the importance of reading classic literature and philosophy, and gazing, intent and bright-eyed, at impossibly beautiful art, at listening to music and feeling it in your warm viscera, will not be for nothing. Because I told her, today, that life does not have to be like this, forever. It hardly ever has to be like this, actually. You do not have to live the way other people do. Just because everyone else believes in foolish things, does not mean you have to join in. You just have to know when to walk away. You have to know that the things society tells you are important – power, wealth, politics, the things people say on Twitter and the like – are not really very important at all. 

Today, we are skipping school. A 41-year-old man is dusting off his long-shelved ability to leave class behind and head out into the real world. I used to be quite good at it, in my youth. I remember leaving some of my college classes after about 15 minutes, heading for the door, and feeing exhilarated as I stepped out into the light of day, the whole world unfolding before me. Today, a little girl is shutting off her computer, putting on a coat, and going outside to play in a blustery autumn wind with a dog and a dad who care about her. We will come home coated in dirt, or mud, and probably wet. The absorbent qualities of my shirt will most certainly be overrun, today, like French troops at the Battle of the Frontiers. We will likely spend a solid chunk of time trying to remove burs from our clothing. This morning, I told her that I love her, but I know this is not proof of anything. This is only a boast, and a promise of what is to come as she shuts off her computer, and I shut off mine…