I am beginning to see more people voicing disagreement with the characterization of our children as having lost a year of school due to the pandemic, and I’m glad that is happening. While it is true that they have lost classroom time, it is not the case that they have gone a year without education.

We can, if we choose, regard these children as having been through an experience that is not quantifiable or measurable by any standardized test, a lesson in adaptation and resilience that could not have been planned or fit into a curriculum. We can try to be alert and sensitive to the emotional, physical, and spiritual damage that might have been done and also help them understand what new skills and strengths they have now. 

The above is true for the rest of us as well, and surviving this gives us all a unique opportunity to reinvent the world and our place in it. It would be a shame if we let it slip away from us while we tried to hang on to the way it used to be. There are things we have set aside, and soon we will begin deciding whether or not to pick them up again. Those decisions are better done on purpose, rather than without consideration. We all change the world in small ways every day, sometimes in one direction, sometimes another. Here is a chance to do so deliberately.

The pandemic has not offered us many silver linings, but this is a big one.