75. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JOINED UP THINKING? - My Continuing Despair at Incoherent Propaganda
I find it increasingly difficult to cast a philosophical eye on the world when that world so constantly ignores logic and reason.
Once again we are coming out of lockdown. On March 8th, a week from today, UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has said all schools should return to in-person teaching. His argument was as follows:
Lockdown easing will be based on the continuing success of the vaccination programme.
The first four groups (over 70s, the clinically extremely vulnerable if 17 or older, frontline health and social care workers, care home residents and staff working in care homes for adults) have been vaccinated.
Therefore the first thing to reopen after lockdown will be schools.
You don’t need a Philosophy degree to see that this argument doesn’t follow and that the conclusion has no connection to the preceding premises. Unless school staff are clinically extremely vulnerable neither staff nor students are included within any of those four initial groups. Therefore opening up schools continues to expose the staff and students attending them to the same threat of the virus which caused them to close back in January. For most staff and all students 16 and under, nothing has changed.
The government makes a second, independent argument (though I hesitate to use the word as it’s really more of an assertion):
The best place for children to be is in school.
Therefore we ought to open schools first.
As I said, the first premise is hugely contestable given the wealth of thought on de-schooling, un-schooling, home-schooling, etc., as well as the number of students happily flourishing during this time of remote learning...but opinions on the first premise are irrelevant to the problem with this argument. You can agree that re-opening schools ought to be the priority but it doesn’t follow that now is the right time. Yes, schools should open first, but nothing ought to open until opening poses it and the community who use it little or no threat of cases spiking. If schools should open first, then school staff and students should also be a priority for vaccination, with schools not opening until the vaccines are completed.
This is not to disagree with the initial four priority groups clearly most at risk from dying of COVID if infected, but simply to recognise that rather than arbitrarily announce a date - March 8th - and stick to it bullheadedly the date when schools re-opened should have been built around a vaccination programme which prioritised teaching staff and students once the initial four groups had been vaccinated. The few extra weeks of remote learning really would not have added much stress to students or teachers already used to the regime - and would add far less stress than COVID entering a household and potentially killing a loved one.
We have a vaccine now, and should be logically linking vaccination rollout to the people who will be returning to face-to-face interactions first. After teachers and students - the parents of school-aged students who can’t work from home. Those who not only could bring COVID into the classrooms through their children, but bring it back from school and take it with them to their workplaces. I have been saddened and fascinated how many of my own school’s students have been sick with COVID since January despite theoretically being “locked down”. The kids might be staying home - but their working parents aren’t.
Likewise, the prioritisation of returning students to school is all good and well - but probably the delivery people, supermarket workers, cab drivers, etc. who make lockdown living possible should be given their jabs before the teachers and students? After all - these are the people unable to stay home and who make it viable for the rest of us to do so. Surely it is in all of our best interest that these people stay healthy and stop the spread too? Again - it might have meant a delay of a few weeks in returning people to schools, but it would guarantee that when the return happened not only would the four most vulnerable categories of people in society protected, and the students and teachers returning to busy classrooms, but there would be less chance of those for whom the vaccination didn’t protect from coming into contact with infections from elsewhere.
Because let’s all remember - one vaccination shot is not a complete vaccination (and the government is only currently counting dose one) so protection is not at its highest, even for those vaccinated. There are also two weeks before the vaccine takes effect, so some are “vaccinated” but the vaccine hasn’t actually kicked in yet. And there are others vaccinated but still infectious to others. Vaccination makes us safer, but not invincible.
If we’d joined up the thinking on schools and vaccination we would probably see students going back after Easter rather than on March 8th - a delay of about a month or six weeks - but rather than going back to a dangerous and uncertain place unchanged from January and with little defence against new more aggressive COVID variants, they would be going back vaccinated, knowing their teachers are vaccinated, knowing the most vulnerable in society and the essential workers who keep society going have been vaccinated and that there really might be light at the end of this incredibly long and dark tunnel.
Instead of joined up thinking, however, we have smoke and mirrors political spin making pseudo connections where there is no connection to be found and using rhetoric, assertion and selective data to whip up a patchwork of emotive ideas instead of a valid and coherent argument.
And yet again, for the sake of political expediency, the victims of such bluff - and its uncritical reception and repetition in media - will be working people forced into harm’s way so that “business as usual” can resume before it is safe to do so. Like I said: it is increasingly difficult to cast a philosophical eye on the world when that world so constantly ignores logic and reason. And at a certain point you have to wonder why you bother?
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers.