Back in 1960, when I graduated from high school ,the prescribed Latin text was the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid.
I never thought I’d look at that text again, but with all the talk about COVID-19 learning loss I was curious.
Was anything lost over a lifetime gone forever?
Of course, 60 years later ,the Latin text is online now so I had to take a look.
“Sic fatur lacrimans, classique immittit habenas, et tandem Euboicis Cumarum adlabitur oris.”
Sixty years later, with not a word of Latin during that time, it was, more or less, somehow familiar. I took a stab at it and, with some help from online Google translate, I still had a good sense of Virgil’s narrative, if not anywhere near an exact translation.
“Thus he spoke, tears in his eyes, gives reins for the fleet
and finally Euboian shores”
No doubt scholars of the classics will be all over me, but you get the general idea.
No, the story came back like a wonderful movie I’d never really forgotten; the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy, Aeneas makes for the Temple of Apollo, where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him — a wonderful story and an ancient language which had survived in the dark corners of my ageing hippocampus — vague and short on detail, but still in there somewhere.
Thanks to the exponential advances in information technology over the past 60 years, I could find what my age and curiosity thought I had lost forever, but now could find again.
Some years ago, I was supervising and enthusiastic young teacher trainee as she taught algebra — a subject I remember disliking intensely in Grade 12.
She was explaining simultaneous equations and how (a+b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2 and why.
Probably because I knew I would not be facing a test, I found it fascinating — “how did I miss out on this stuff — I sort of remember it now.”
So I looked up “simultaneous equations.” Again, there it all was, in an instant.
The point of all this nostalgia is that what we learned once we probably never forget altogether and, despite time away from the classroom, and with access to the technology to retrieve it, should we so choose, it is still at the tips of our fingers on a computer keyboard.
That being so, I have to wonder if all the dire predictions about kids “losing their education” because of COVID school shutdowns is missing the point. Information learnt in a classroom is not lost because of a pause in school attendance.
In fact, every September teachers retrieve, revisit and refresh previous learning in the first week or so back at school before moving on to the new stuff.
In the age of home-based curricular centred learning technology the particulars of even an obscure Latin text — even algebra can be retrieved and relearned easily enough — if needed for some reason.
What might be lost unless we come up with alternatives such as a safe and workable “Plan B” for getting kids back into schools at least part time is more profound and possibly more damaging to our society than that.
What might be lost is the experience of socio-cultural equity that schools create.
As our schools are moving online during the COVID shutdown, some suburban groups of parent are already considering employing tutors and creating mini-schools at home.
Other parents will buy upgraded home computers or send their kids to independent schools if they have the financial wherewithal to do that .
But if cultural equity through educational opportunity is something we had challenges with before COVID, a reprise of shutdowns of public schools as a “Plan B” will further magnify existing social inequities and cultural class divisions.
So what do we do? One alternative might be shortening the hours of instruction and running the schools on morning and afternoon shifts, which would reduce the school building’s population on any given day and reduce virus risks.
That way kids still experience public school with other kids not from families like their own. That’s how kids learn about living in a diverse community, learn about living in a diverse Canada. That’s something we really don’t want to lose.
And kids who have special individual learning needs? Most learning specialists suggests that when schools do reopen, it is those kids who should be prioritized for as much time as possible in classrooms with specially trained teachers.
Let’s get this “class composition” thing right for those kids this time around.
Finally, let’s face the fact that starting classrooms safely, with reduced class sizes, reduced hours of instruction, specialist teachers, upgraded air-circulation systems, insistence on wearing masks, sanitizing hands and maintaining social distancing if it is all done properly, will be more difficult and more expensive than anybody thought.
But as as Joni Mitchell so succinctly put it: “You don’t know what you’ve lost ’til it’s gone.”
So let’s not save dollars in the short term by allowing COVID to cost public education more than anybody can afford in the long term.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
