“No societal shift has impacted my adult life as profoundly as the extended closure of schools during the pandemic. At first, I mourned my career, which I gave up to facilitate the purgatory of Zoom “school” for my first grader. Then I mourned my family’s precarious, hard-won harmony, which dissolved into endless fights about time, work and space. Finally, I mourned the faith I’d held, without ever recognizing it as such, in public institutions. I discovered I no longer believed in school. I no longer believed in many of the systems I’d taken for granted as mostly valuable and functional. I spun out into despair, then anger, then a flat, terrible resignation.”
Read more at the New York Times Book Review.