An Aristotelian View of Schools: Why the Government Got Covid So Wrong in Schools.

Aristotle believed that objects fall at a speed that is proportional to their weight. In other words, if you took a wooden object and a metal object of the same size and dropped them both, the heavier metal object would fall at a proportionally faster speed.

Now there's a degree of truth in that because of air resistance. If you took a stone and a feather, outside of a vacuum, the feather would fall slower. But it is not true because two objects could have equal weight but be of different sizes and shapes, and fall at different speeds. That's a basic truism of fluid dynamics.

Why start with that? Well, why did Aristotle get it so wrong? He looked at a few objects, and he thought about it. He did not do detailed experimental work to see if his hypothesis was false. He did thought experiments.

The policy on schools being open, as it controls the mixing of pupils in a safe way is just like that. It is not actually based on any study of how pupils behave within schools.

Linda on Facebook comments on this:

"Should schools be reopening? What do you think?  The most recent estimates from the Office for National Statistics show that the prevalence of infection with Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – is highest among secondary school-age children, which suggests they are a considerable source of community transmission, said Dr Stefan Flasche , an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine."

And she goes on to say:

"The disruptions they’ve suffered over the past 6 weeks plus many are anxious about getting a call from the track and trace team. Some young people have spent many weeks in isolation, not only at home but stuck in their room, unable to spend time with their families."

"Unless this virus is well controlled we may see this happening again. There are certainly concerns for the mental health of young people if they are having to isolate for up to two weeks then return to school, only to be told 3 days later that they must isolate again as another friend has tested positive. This has been the reality for some and is far more likely to be harmful than organised online teaching while rates are so high?"

Now when schools originally re-opened it was staggered classes with 2 metre distancing. And that  might work while they’re sitting down, but as she points out "have you seen common areas in schools when the bell goes, they aren’t socially distancing at break times etc.?"

And I have it on good authority that at least one Secondary School sees the end of the day come at the same time for all pupils - not staggered in any way - so that the children all come out from different year groups at the same time, and mix together, again often without much social distancing or wearing face masks. 

Far from controlling the spread, experimental data, and looking at the actual behaviour of children - and how the schools do their exits - show that it increases the chance of transmitting the virus far more than would be the case otherwise. The government's though experiment - it controls children's behaviour and limits the spread of the virus - is as much a fantasy based on lack of experimental method, as Aristotle's theory of gravity. Far from "following the science", it is wilfully ignoring the science.

As a study reported by National Geographic points out:

"The takeaway is that a critical shift appears somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12. Around the time of puberty, the risk of teenagers both getting and transmitting the virus increases. The COVID Monitor, a group tracking information from more than 7,000 U.S. school districts, found that high school case rates are nearly three times that of elementary schools."

Will our Government take note?