[ SECRET POST #5999 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5999 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________

























06. [SPOILERS for Yellowjackets]




__________________________________________________



07. [WARNING for discussion of sexual assault, child grooming]


























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #857.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Domestic abuse in western countries, particularly the US and U.K., were at an all time high in 2020 so your last point is kinda eh.

[(Anonymous)]

Including for some kids where school was/is an escape from abusive/neglectful home lives.

[(Anonymous)]

Childhood food security wasn't doing so great either. And kids who were already socioeconomically disadvantaged took several more hits due to the loss of onsite resources provided by schools and libraries and lack of reliable internet at home.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I find it interesting that people (who can mostly afford to feed their children?) default reflexively to arguing that if other people's children don't have food to eat because the schools are closed, that automatically justifies all the other harm that school does, and the only answer possible is to immediately reopen them.

[(Anonymous)]

Nayrt

But by that same token, it’s interesting that just because some kids have it worse at school than at home, that automatically ignores all the good schools can do, and all justifies the harm that keeping every kid out of school can do for the ones with bad home lives. And so your answer would seem to be to keep schools closed indefinitely just for the kids who have terrible school lives, as opposed to opening schools up immediately for the kids who have horrible home lives. I’m just saying, a lot of the criticism you’re aiming at others can be applied to your arguments too. It’s fine to care more about the harm school can cause, but that doesn’t mean it’s more or less important than the kids who have horrible home lives and benefit from school being a safer place for them with helpful resources. Both are valid viewpoints, so I’m not saying you’re wrong at all, it’s just a bit more nuanced than that.

An anyways, it wasn’t really the kids with bad home lives, or disadvantaged families that started the push to open schools back up immediately. That was more of a government push, as well as a parent group/school board thing, with a side of corporate interference. Everyone who had a stake in schools being open was pushing for them to reopen before it was even remotely safe, but it wasn’t the disadvantaged that had that kind of pull.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

First the anon I responded to cited the plight of children whose parents' wages are far enough below the poverty line that they can't afford to feed them, as if schools were the only way to provide one hot meal per day to hungry children. Then you shifted the issue to kids whose home life is traumatic. Neither of these actually makes a case for schools being *better* than anything that could be described as not-neglect and not-abuse? And none of this addresses the realities of many children whose home life is not unbearable, while their school situation is.

I think our best bet at making school less abusive involves making it voluntary. Kids who learn well there could keep going. But kids who do better when they're not forced to attend school could leave without breaking the law. And that might well pressure the system to serve a lot of people it currently mistreats and brushes off, in the hope of winning them back.

I'd say everything you observed about school reopenings being motivated by politics and economics, as opposed to concern for marginalized kids, was on target, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Frankly, there are a lot of reasons besides "literally can't afford food" that children benefit from school meal programs, and also there are thousands of children who get more than one meal a day through those programs. There are also thousands of children who benefit from access to climate control, libraries, reliable internet service, and yes, adults who are not their parents or relatives or church members. Frankly, the fact that you think that none of these things are as important as the fact that you hated school so much that you'd rather everyone keep their kids at home and think that's what's best for most children has a lot more to do with your personal issues than politics, early childhood education, or reality.

[(Anonymous)]

Kids without reliable internet at home were suffering before the pandemic. For some of them the pandemic meant an end to this bit of suffering.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Domestic abuse is an issue regardless of whether the schools are open or closed. I heard a great deal from the media about how parents were going to be spectacularly awful to their kids because they were staying home all day and having to deal with each other, but I know of zero cases, even through the friends-of-acquaintances, where anything of the sort happened. (And people certainly talked at length about their experiences with the pandemic!)

In contrast, quite a few kids who were in long term conflicts with their parents because they dreaded school improved noticeably from being able to concentrate on just trying to deal with their subjects, without having to live in fear of the other kids for an extended period of time, and I have not seen this addressed anywhere official, at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Not saying you’re incorrect about some kids having better lives outside of school, because you’re absolutely not, but you not hearing or cases of the opposite doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. And you hearing more of those who benefited from schools being closed doesn’t mean that was the majority experience, or more likely and important than those who benefited from schools being open. Neither are more important than each other, of course, because different people have different situations. And both types of situations are valid, which makes it a complicated discussion, since nobody is really wrong about it here.

Maybe the reason why you haven’t seen it addressed anywhere is the same reason you haven’t seen any cases of abusive home lives getting worse after schools closed? That being that it did happen, but not everyone saw or noticed it as much as some others. Just like you saw more kids who had a better life away from school, but saw no cases of kids who had a worse life, other people only saw the kids who had it worse after, and they didn’t consider the kids who had it better as much because they didn’t personally see it. I know some people hate the word anecdotal, but I do think whether you’ve seen one or the other more is mostly down to anecdotal experience, not a statement on how it is generally. That’s just my opinion though, and I’m nowhere near an expert on this.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I'm not saying there was none of that. I'm saying the media shoved all the news coverage in the direction of "look at how children SUFFERED when we temporarily stopped institutionalizing them by force!!" And this looked very questionable to me and still does. I haven't seen any sort of complicated or nuanced discussion of the situation because there's been zero acknowledgement that schools can be harmful to any of the people in them, or that they could possibly be better off anywhere else, for any reason at all.