Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

The debates about the trade-offs of closing schools for in-person learning suffered under similar polarized logics. There is no doubt that there have been points when schools and businesses needed to be shut down—but where were the debates about why shopping malls and casinos were allowed to stay open in many of those same periods? After the initial, unavoidably chaotic lockdown period in the spring of 2020, we should have paid more attention to the toll of online learning: the terrible equity impacts on lower-income families who didn’t have the tech; the way it left out many students with developmental disabilities who needed in-person supports; the way it made it impossible for single parents to work outside the home and often inside it, with devastating effects for mothers in particular; the mental health impacts that social isolation was having on countless young people.