It's a chance to rethink child care.
 | By Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer Culture Editor, Opinion |
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The idea for Bryce Covert’s latest piece came from a simple observation: Wasn’t it baffling, she wrote me late this summer, that some counties were planning to keep schools closed for in-person teaching — and so as a result, in-person child care centers had been opened up in their place? These policy choices, she said, seemed … odd. “Instead of free, in-person schooling, you get expensive in-person child care, which is different how?” she wrote.
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We have, Bryce argues, long drawn a fairly arbitrary distinction between “school” — a place where kids 5 and older go during the day to learn and, coincidentally, are supervised by responsible adults — and “child care,” a place where kids younger than 5 go during the day to be supervised by adults and, coincidentally, develop and learn. |
This wasn’t always the case. Back in the day, when “schools” weren’t much more than single rooms with a teenage girl standing at the front of them, it wasn’t uncommon for pupils to trudge off for the day, 6-month-old siblings in tow. (Did you know that said 6-month-olds were often parked in front of the schoolhouse fires for the day to sleep and stay warm? Adorable! What’s that? They were undersupervised and sometimes fell into the fires? …. oh.) |
But in the 1800s, America’s school system was revamped and reformed; schools were now the serious business of the state, places where the country's youngest citizens would learn how to become participants in democracy. (No time for putting out flammable babies.) Child care, meanwhile, developed around a totally different logic and imperative: Moms — yes, even then — needed to work. And they needed somewhere safe for children to go while they did so. |
The result, more than a century on, is a dichotomy that didn’t work well even before the pandemic. We have a state-run school system that remains wildly disconnected from the schedules of working parents — why do school days finish in the midafternoon? what’s up with summer vacation? — and a largely-private child care system that is expensive and patchwork. |
“It has taken a once-in-a-lifetime crisis to reveal what was always true,” Bryce writes. “School is — whisper it — a form of child care; child care, at its best, fosters children’s development.” |
Recognizing the false dichotomy is the first step. But can we take this once-in-a-lifetime crisis as an opportunity to put together something better? |
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