Opinion: COVID-19, from a student’s perspective
There is a certain complexity that comes with being a student. One must simultaneously grow and stay grounded, develop selfhood and become selfless, fly from the nest and yet treasure it too. The schoolhouse is that institution where a young person, such as myself, learns to be human while already on the job, a daunting task for those not equipped with the necessary provisions. The school may just be the most essential body a nation – and a community such as Northport-East Northport – can possess.
This is why it seems to me so tragic (and comic) that the public schoolhouse should be the battleground of one of America’s most hyper-partisan scuffles: masking and Covid.
The dispute reached its zenith when, on Tuesday, January 25, due to a decision by Nassau County Supreme Court Justice Thomas Rademaker, Northport-East Northport went mask-optional for one day. The decision in question involved the constitutionality of Governor Hochul’s mask policy in schools and businesses, which Rademaker said had to first go through the State’s Legislature.
Based on my own anecdotal observations from the halls of Northport High School, I would estimate approximately one-half of the student body went maskless on that mask-optional day, while a large majority of teachers kept theirs on. As the school day came to a close, New York State appealed the decision to the State’s Appellate Division, where a judge granted a stay in the lawsuit over the mask mandate. The mandate will thus remain in place while the ruling is appealed.
Some clarification: It is not one particular faction of this dispute I find quite tragic – no, it is the simple fact of the egregiousness of its discourse that I differ with instead.
For the majority of us who do not relegate ourselves to a particular camp on these issues – mask or no mask, mandate or no mandate – one can begin to feel less than, both as a politically involved citizen and an emotionally driven human being. It feels almost inhumane to not try both, pick a side, and marry it resolutely. This position, however, is often the default of the student; a hyper-partisan issue has been crammed into a nonpartisan body, yet we expect this to have no effects – it is in this sense I find the current age both beneficial and dreadful.
First, the former. It is always an interesting phenomenon to have curriculum literally enter the classroom, and the mask debacle is no such exception. The issue at hand, and the subsequent blocs that have consumed the debate like an avian scavenger, is a delicious cocktail of curricular checkpoints any political science course surely has covered by now: federalism, bodily autonomy, mandates, appellate courts, individualism versus collectivism, and grant-in-aid programs, not to mention the central tenets of argumentative speaking and critical thinking.
The student now simply cannot escape civics; he wears it on his face, he injects it in his arm, he hears it at the dinner table scattered among chicken fingers and french fries. Never before have I felt the local government more alive than right now. Whether this is a positive, I cannot say; I can just point out its existence as I see it. As well, there are some wonderfully interesting and difficult questions hidden under all this spit and blood: What does it mean to be an American citizen? At what point does the role of Caesar cease? Does the State have imagination, and if so, how far may one exercise it?
If an educator or parent would simply ask the curious student such questions, our democracy would finally break its stagnation and begin to thicken up a bit.
Secondly, the latter. The walls of the Northport-East Northport public schools have, over the past two years, begun to change hue – either red or blue, depending on how you see it. This inherent political bend simultaneously bends the students; once the properties of the schoolhouse change, the students passing through its body alter organically with it.
Accepting this hypothesis, the dutiful men and women our public schools are attempting to create – because, as we cannot forget, education teaches us to be human – are now destined to become more divisive, rhetorically unassuming, dogmatic, hot-headed, unpersuasive, and irrational as a result. As I say, this debacle is a verse play of undetermined genre. It is both comic and tragic; all the players involved seem to possess both humor and hubris in undefined proportions. Yet the play need not be this bloody, inhumane, or redundant.
I, for one, am a “hopeful optimist” (this is not to be confused with the syntactically similar yet altogether antithetical “optimist who is hopeful”). I would venture to guess many of us are alike in this respect – we hope for optimism, yet don’t necessarily expect it. It is in this grasping for hope that we attempt to, as the late Joan Didion put it, look for the “sermon in the suicide.”
To find such a sermon, if there should be one, I feel we should turn to an anecdote of Shakespeare I heard recently and have not stopped thinking about since. It goes as follows: A simple-minded old lady sees the play King Lear performed on the stage and is outraged that such a poor old man should be so made to suffer. The old lady discovers Shakespeare on the street one afternoon and airs such a grievance to him, to which Shakespeare retorts, “I agree, ma’am, it was quite painful. I could have, after all, arranged for Lear to take a sedative at the end of Act One. But then, ma’am, there would have been no play.”
Without this truth presented to him, the student may come to believe that the pandemic, and its idiosyncrasies, masks, and so on, has all been in vain. Yet this isn’t so. If we wish for the next generation – my generation – to truly multiply from this situation, we must present to him, as quickly as possible, the following truth: That suffering, tragedy are all part of the drama, and that one must go through the play entirely to see why one had to suffer at all.
Harrison LeBow is a senior at Northport High School. He plans on majoring in Education and hopes to be a high school teacher.
