In Agatha Christie’s much-admired, oft-filmed “Murder on the Orient Express,” her irresistible Belgian detective, the great Hercule Poirot, finds his “little gray cells” stymied by a case in which everyone is a suspect. Everyone has it in for the loathsome victim, a child murderer on the order of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, the inspiration for Christie’s villain.
I think it fair to say that we have reached the “Murder on the Orient Express” portion of the people versus the Trump Administration, and the denouement is at hand. Each day brings some fresh outrage against a group that won’t be voting for him. (Roger Stone-pardon critics and New Yorkers, anyone?) Recently, the wheel turned to educators and parents whom the president and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, are trying to bully into getting kids back into the classroom this fall as the virus still rages and no clear plan is in sight.
No one believes more fervently in education than I do. Indeed, I said years ago that the two things that will bring this country down are a lack of leadership and a lack of education. And since it was ignorance, along with greed, that led to the election of Donald J. Trump, who has no leadership skills, I have been proven right — though it gives me no joy. An education teaches you how to think critically and express that thinking, trains you for jobs and careers and, perhaps most important, introduces you to those who think differently. I not only want young people to have the opportunities I did. I want America to be competitive in the world again, instead of the sad sack we’ve become.
But at what price? I raise this question as s woman who made a decision at a very young age — puberty — never to marry and/or get pregnant. I realized early on that feminism or no, women would never be the equal of men in our society unless they were financially and emotionally independent — something the Supreme Court’s decisions on women’s reproductive rights prove in the negative regularly. Men and children are just too high maintenance, I thought, for someone who wanted to be a writer and have a life of the mind.
Having said that, I do as a writer have an imagination and empathy, something completely lacking in the president. I can imagine what it’s like to hear that children will be reporting for class next month and to be struck by the sheer terror of it all. How are families and schools going to navigate staggered openings and closings when classes have to take place and parents have to be at work at certain times? How will everyone from the lunchroom lady to the superintendent protect himself with PPE when teachers have to buy things like crayons, because there’s no money for supplies? How will students socially distance when some classes in urban public schools have been conducted in — wait for it — bathrooms? Whom are Trump and DeVos kidding?
Fortunately, the decision rests with state and local governments. Already, New York City, with the nation’s largest school system, is going to have students attend part-time. Is this ideal? Of course not. But the alternative may be more prolonged agony and even greater economic pain.
And yet, I understand that there’s going to be agony and great economic pain for students and families who don’t have access to in-person education. Many low-income and foreign students in particular count on the housing, employment, mentorship and networking that campus life and in-person interaction provide. It isn’t just about taking Zoom classes and writing papers.
Still, virtual learning is not to be demeaned. The notion promulgated by Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security — Is there anyone in the Trump Administration who isn’t '“acting”? — that foreign students can’t stay here if they attend classes online only is ludicrous. Is he less acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security when he’s working virtually? Many of these kids would be adversely affected — either because of time-zone differences or the poverty and danger endemic to their homelands — if they were kicked out of the U.S., which is why Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have filed a lawsuit against the administration’s attempt to deny foreign attendees their student visas. (This even as Harvard apparently makes it harder for students to return to school or engage in remote learning.)
The goal is clear: We must get students back into school for their own sakes as well as that of the economy. But how do we do it safely? Trump should see this. Yet his interest is not the students or even the economy. It’s the reelection that would give him the adulation fix he cannot live without. It’s the “teacher, teacher, notice me” effect.
And we all know how well those students do.