After the experience last spring, students, parents, and teachers know that remote learning is a degraded and degrading replacement for in-person instruction. Students learn less. At the same time, the stubborn push by both wings of the U.S. ruling class to reopen schools is driven by their reckless drive for profits and need for social control. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers, a union born in racism and anti-communism (see CHALLENGE, 3/27/14) has begun strike preparations while making no provisions to care for student instruction or counseling. It’s clear that the remote vs. in-person debate is a racist, lose-lose proposition for the working class.
Capitalist schooling trains us to treat the working class as expendable. We are taught that it is inevitable that some workers and youth will be homeless, unemployed, or incarcerated. Education workers are habituated to accept some dropouts, suspensions, and failure as unavoidable. As much as capitalist schools teach expendability, they also strive to teach patriotism and build loyalty to U.S. imperialism. If millions of youth are left without the grip of social control while the facade of stability crumbles around us, imperialists will have a harder time winning workers to fight a war with China.
That’s why we fight for communism, where no worker or child will be treated as expendable because we will eliminate the profit motive that drives all aspects of this society.
A divided U.S. ruling class is united in contempt for workers’ lives
We can see the capitalists’ “doctrine of worker expendability” in full view within both wings of the divided U.S. ruling class. For Trump and his gang of domestically-oriented bosses, orders to “reopen the schools now!” means more short-term profits, maintaining credibility with an anti-science base, and advancing their openly racist, nationalist “America-First” re-election campaign, all while adding fuel to the flame for fascist ideas like “the survival of the fittest.”
The stakes to reopen the schools and economy are much higher for the dominant, imperialist wing of the ruling class, represented in New York City by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor  Bill de Blasio. Despite crumbling infrastructure, the imperialist wing bosses are scrambling to reopen schools in finance-capital’s home base of New York in hopes of restoring a sense of legitimacy to U.S. capitalism, both globally and domestically. They will need to win workers to fight yet another imperialist war.
A “lost generation” disillusioned and unfit for this task will hinder their ability to wage such a war. Liberals’ phony, silver-tongued appeals to workers that “we are all in this together” and empty assurances that “we are ready” show that the liberal wing is the main danger to the working class. They are just as ready as ever to have workers die from both Covid-19 and World War III for their long-term profits.
The blatant disregard for workers’ lives shown by both wings of the U.S. ruling class is a hallmark of rising fascism. Capitalists of any stripe are workers’ enemies.
Dangers of remote learning
Opening schools with few safety resources and protocols will prove deadly to workers and students, but remote learning has its own dangers—especially for those that cannot afford to have an adult in the home every day. Not to mention the added trauma for students in temporary housing or shelters! Real collaboration, social interaction, and hands-on learning are nonexistent. We cannot simply reflexively accept the disastrous and racist choice to have young minds rot at home.
Remote learning runs the risk of piling on another layer of normalized neglect to the already-callous and racist culture of capitalist schooling. Black, Latin, and immigrant working-class students face the brunt of this attack, whether it is due to limited, inconsistent or lack of computer and Internet access, the need to work to support their families, or in a home with no quiet space to do schoolwork. So too do students with special needs and language needs. Assuming students have the personal organization and technological skills to learn remotely, this extensive screen time is linked to altered sleep cycles and affects students’ physical and mental health (Johns Hopkins Newsletter, 4/20). Not to mention how profoundly isolating the experience is for developing minds and bodies.
Lives are not expendable, and neither are minds.
Reopening school
Capitalists hold state power, for now. They will reopen their schools, sooner or later. Vaccination, once safe and effective, will reduce but not eliminate risk. There is no possibility of returning to “safe schools.” Poor ventilation, budget cuts and massive layoffs that hurt working-class schools hardest, inadequate disinfection, and insufficient physical distancing and PPE measures all mean no safe schools. The families who need schools the most will send their kids in first,and love their kids no less than anyone else. More than learning, schools provide health services, lunch, physical therapy, language, counseling and other related services. Calling to keep schools closed “until they’re safe” without recognizing this reality, and without genuine planning for student needs, undermines the cause of building working-class solidarity.
Despite examples of parent-teacher-student unity during this current crisis, there remains a possibility that the working class—students, parents, and teachers—could emerge from this crisis even more fractured. This potential for  division may be the greatest danger of all. Education workers must fight back alongside their students against the bosses’ system, which has set our class up to fail in what will certainly be a tougher school year. Every rotten aspect of capitalist schools reinforces the same lesson for us: a system that can’t educate and care for its youth does not deserve to exist, and we must learn together what it will take to smash it. Join Progressive Labor Party!
No ‘lost generations’ for communists
Communists and many anti-racist education workers refuse to accept that Covid-19 will result in a “lost generation.” We know that the working class is full of fighters, and that whether remote or in-person, education workers and students must use the sharp study of math, science, history and language to explore how Covid-19 reveals the racist poison of capitalism and the need for a new, communist society. In the event of a strike, we must organize outdoor “Freedom Schools” where we relate schoolwork to survival of this pandemic. We must conduct home visits for absent students. Parents and students must be invited to picket lines where
education workers can teach students while parents work or run essential errands. As during the recent anti-police rebellions, life’s greatest lessons are learned in the class struggle. Each connection between workers is one seed of a communist future, when tended by a growing Progressive Labor Party.
Every worker can contribute to the fight for a better world. Both coronavirus and recent international anti-racist uprisings have led many youth to criticize and reject this political and economic system. These shifts in consciousness present an exciting opportunity, and we must ensure that the alienation felt by so many students is turned into class struggle, rather than nihilism and cynicism. We know that students can learn more from a single protest against police brutality than in a whole year of capitalist history curriculum. A better world is possible, and we need the power of the entire working class to create it!