March, 2022
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By In education, Hawaii

Schools Don’t Cause Societal Tensions But They Can Address Them

Once vaccines rolled out, reopening schools felt like an important step toward resuming normal life, whatever that means in an ongoing pandemic.

This fake-it-til-you-make-it wish for normalcy was still probably the best available option – students suffered real harm being out of school and away from peers for so long – but it doesn’t mean there haven’t been issues with it. Teachers across the country have been seeing them every day, primarily as disruptive out-of-seat behaviors in class, self-harm and fighting.

It’s not hard to understand why. Students have been through varying degrees of trauma these past two years, and trauma significantly impacts how we think, learn and behave. The fundamental challenge of sociological analysis is determining where social and institutional culpability ends and individual agency begins, but in the case of children, it’s pretty clear that we can’t blame them for responding poorly to the intensity of their environments…

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