Since Corona, Jeremy has been roaming the streets of the small town in Saxony-Anhalt where he lives. The children’s leisure club, which he used to like to visit, was closed for a long time. Now there are strict hygiene regulations there. “That’s stupid,” thinks the second grader. Today he played with a friend with whom he wasn’t actually allowed to do that. Because this does not belong to his “cohort”. The foreign word comes easily from the child’s lips. At school he heard: “If I leave my cohort, I may be able to kill others.”
Jeremy’s mother wants to remain anonymous. The single parent works for a large mail order company, like many others in the small prefabricated housing estate. She packs packages and increases with Hartz IV. Her 84-year-old neighbor took care of Jeremy when schools were closed in the spring. There is no home office for parcel packers, and initially there was no emergency care for their children. Since Corona you can see many grandparents with their grandchildren in the settlement. Protection of risk groups? “Stop that, they live in a bubble up there,” waves a resident of the apartment building who is currently looking after his granddaughter.
The school supplied Jeremy and his classmates with learning materials during the first lockdown. Thick piles of paper came every week. His mother tossed through these with him in the evenings after work. The primary school has adjusted to the fact that poorer families have at most one smartphone. That is not enough for digital teaching.
Long before Corona, poor children had worse educational opportunities than wealthy ones. That is known. The conclusion of the Union for Education and Science (GEW) is not surprising: Those who lacked material and human resources were left behind by the school closings. The federal government held against it with half a billion euros. Schools should use these to procure digital devices so that they can be lent to pupils in need. That’s all. There is nothing against the threat of job loss, fears of the future or the humiliation of being “uneducated”.
When Corona began, Jeremy had just been a school child for half a year. Suddenly, after working with him, the mother had to practice the basics of writing, reading and arithmetic. To this day he has had major problems with it. “He’ll probably have to repeat second grade,” she says. The boy rolls his eyes. “School is stupid,” he thinks. It is “much stricter than before Corona”.
It’s a long break: children stand like play figures with mouth and nose protection and distance in the yard, each class for itself. Some boys animate each other with faxes, girls hop on one leg from one concrete slab to the next. A masked supervisor makes sure that the children do not get too close to each other. When the break is over, the cohorts line up. In single file it goes to the school house.
The continuous ventilation has cooled the rooms. The children are allowed to keep their jackets on in class. At last they were only allowed to take off the masks. While many authorities have long since received air filters, ventilation and wearing masks are the only realizable political concept for schoolchildren. The proposal to split classes is likely to fail in reality due to the lack of teachers that has been known for many years.
“Nobody wants a corona case in the facility,” says a supervisor when asked. Then dozens of students and teachers would have to be quarantined. “That would make everything worse.” That is why you stick to the hygiene rules meticulously. The German Teachers Association estimated at the beginning of November that more than 300,000 students and around 30,000 educators were isolated at home at the time. “In quarantine you are no longer allowed to play outside,” says Jeremy. He lives with his mother on 47 square meters.
Quarantine in the plate
The mother of five-year-old Mia and her two-year-old brother know what quarantine means in a small apartment. In Mia’s daycare center, someone had tested positive for the corona virus several times. For the second time in quick succession, the single-parent family is now stuck in less than 60 square meters, at home in a Bavarian city. The seller is fighting for compensation from the authorities. Because there is nothing from health insurance for healthy children. Your annual vacation was already used up in spring to look after the children. She fears for her job and has already calculated that her apartment is almost 100 euros more expensive than Hartz IV allows.
She feels “at the end of my tether”: “It is different to be stuck with a secure job in a house with land than with an insecure job and two small children in a mini-apartment,” she says on the phone. “The children cannot understand why they are not allowed out,” she adds and asks rhetorically: “What if new cases keep coming up in the day-care centers or if the children have a cold – do we have to sit here locked up all winter?”
“Your child can do it,” the psychiatrist Jan Kalbitzer recently tried to affect parents Spiegel to motivate. Because children are “tough and adaptable”. His suggestion for mothers and fathers? “Better to take a deep breath instead of hysterically exploiting children.” He also tried to compare it with war children who would have survived difficult times “with enough basic trust”.
Children are discussed in the media rather than with children. “Virologists criticize the attitude of the countries that schools are not drivers of the pandemic,” it said in the DOES from November 18. Three days later, in the same newspaper, a teacher from Frankfurt am Main complained about too lax measures in schools and that the children were too ignorant about everyday masks. She does not want to accept “maybe even to die”. One philosophizes how infectious and contagious children are presumed to be at what age – as if there were all kinds of potential threats.
Mia’s mother feels such debates as “insulting”, “from above” and “unrealistic”. Her daughter is already asking if Corona will finally be over when she goes to school next summer. She fears not being allowed to play with her friend there. The mother is afraid of slipping into Hartz IV and having to move.
Social associations have been warning for months that Corona will continue to leave the poorer part of the population behind. In its new poverty report, the Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband reported an increase in poverty as early as 2019. More than every fifth child lives under material deprivation. Above all, the rights of these children have not been protected by politics, stated the Magdeburg childhood scientist Michael Klundt in September at a hearing of the Bundestag Children’s Commission. Those under protection were “treated like objects” and many mothers were pushed back into old role models. Nothing has happened since then. The children’s commission is symbolic – and the ideal overall patriarch, the state, is no better answer to the pandemic.
