Personally, I agree with you about schools opening being more about parents going back to work, and I think it’s going to be disastrous.

I’ve been homeschooling for a about 3 years now under a modified unschooling philosophy mostly. (Get the basic 3 R’s under your belt, learn how to learn, and then follow your passions.) It’s working well and it’s been business as usual since the start of the pandemic. We’ve not really been affected educationally by the pandemic and that’s been a much needed silver lining for me as a single parent.

Even so, it was a hard switch when we made the move to homeschooling in a lot of ways. We tried K12, that didn’t go over well. We did better when we got away from the rigid organizational structure and went through a decompression phase.

In the same way, I think virtual education is completely workable. You just have to accept that there’s a learning curve on how to do it successfully. So you poke at it and fine tune it until you figure out how to make it work for you.

I think that once virtual work goes through that same process, we may be surprised to find just how many people don’t want to go back to life like before.

I feel pretty confident that if we hadn’t already been homeschooling, and I was facing this fall’s impending schoolpocalypse, I wouldn’t do it. There’s too much at stake. I would make the switch now and not look back. I would find a way to make it work.