Thomas Kane’s “Learning Losses”

Since 2022—if not earlier—Thomas Kane has been banging a drum for more schooling as a remedy to what he’s calling “learning losses.” He was still banging that drum in 2023, and still is these days, too. Specifically, he argues that kids fell so far behind during in school during the pandemic that they won’t be able to catch up on their own. Kane apparently has pretty hard research showing how much this is the case, measured in “points” and also measured in weeks of school. He tends to argue that kids are so-and-so many weeks behind where kid were immediately before the pandemic, in terms of reading and math.

Personally, I agree with David Berliner that Kane’s assessment of the situation shows a lack of common sense. Berliner gives a lot of good reasons why we should doubt Kane’s claims, too. 

To Berliner’s criticisms, I’d add my own.

Kane seems to have forgotten that children are people, like the rest of us. Kane wants us to believe that kids mostly fell behind because of school closures, and I’ll be honest: duh. Of course some of it was caused by that. Teachers, even the best, were scrambling to figure out online teaching, and some of us—like me—had to deal with a lot of administrative nonsense that was an impediment to adapting well to online teaching.1

But that isn’t the whole picture. Think back over the pandemic. Remember the stress, and worry, and anxiety? Lots of people I know, even writers, found they couldn’t concentrate well enough to read like they had in the past. (I experienced this, and I’m still recovering from it here in late 2024.) Lots of people suddenly became less productive in their work. Lots of people struggled to find the motivation to do things.

Plenty of people also lost faith in the system when they started seeing mass graves on TV and the death rates skyrocketing. And, of course, since Kane’s talking about the United States—the country that was, due to administrative negligence, among the worst hit by COVID—a lot of people were traumatized by the loss of a parent, grandparent, or other loved one. Kids were also sent to school unvaccinated in a lot of places, sent only to be forced not to wear masks in some places, pressured to maintain pre-pandemic levels of productivity, just like many terrible bosses did, making no allowances for the psychological and logistical challenges of lockdowns and everything else that was going on.  

If you cannot recognize this, you have no business proposing solutions for this problem. You have to think of students a little more holistically. Sometimes, individuals or groups of people are not in a good position to learn. Sometimes, they’re dealing with trauma and an unprecedented level of stress or anxiety. Sometimes it’s important to take the bigger picture into account and cut people some slack, to prioritize what’s important, to accept that some “learning losses” are inevitable. And I’d argue that what’s important for kids who lived through the last few years along with us is for them to process and digest the experience, to deal with the traumas they sustained and anxieties they developed, rather than forcing those feelings down in the name of “productivity.”

We are terrible at dealing with mass trauma, of course, and not just with kids. Often, instead of giving people the collective space and breathing room to work through stuff like that, we instead press on, deluding ourselves that if only we can remain “productive,” or become even more productive, the bad feelings will go away on their own. They don’t, of course, and the productivity comes at the cost of a stunted, or prolonged, or thwarted recovery. 

It’s not that I haven’t noticed the declining preparedness among freshmen with each passing year: I get the impression that each new crop of students is socially less agile and aware than the last batch; more timid, less willing to speak in class, to participate in group discussions. As a writing teacher, it doesn’t concern me much that they didn’t learn as much about writing in high school as undergrads of years past had learned, because often what they had learned amounted to bad habits I had to help them unlearn. What concerns me is how much unresolved trauma and residual anxiety I see in students. Helping bring them up to speed doesn’t require summer school and longer schooling hours (regardless of how corporations would love that): they can learn a lot of stuff as undergrads, like their parents did. What they need help with is processing what they’ve been through, and I’ve seen very little evidence that increased schooling does that.  

And as for Kane’s argument that the solution is more schooling, well: I live in South Korea, the country with the most schooling in the developed world. Hell, it not only has the most schooling, it also has one of the most intensive forms of schooling, and that’s not even including all the secondary, extramural schooling (in “hakwons”) that families impose on kids during evenings and weekends. Kids do advance a lot faster in some subjects: for example, they learn math in elementary school that North Americans only learn in middle school (and learn in high school math that only some of us learn in university, and many of us never learn). 

All that schooling has a cost, though. Those who praise Korea’s hyper-schooling rarely mention that cost: the high levels of stress kids experience, the suicides over grades and university entrance exam results, the sheer loss of childhood experienced by so many. You end up with a lot of people who find any kind of learning drudgery—even many academics who seem to feel that way—and teachers who assume learning is and should be drudgery, and who end up being incurious. You also end up parents who, when their kids are having fun learning something, immediately assume the kid isn’t learning because the “right” kind of learning isn’t and cannot be fun. 

You also end with a lot of people who hate reading, who think history is boring, who are traumatized by their experience in language and math study, and who as university students grind through degrees in fields that don’t remotely interest them, without ever pausing to consider pursuing a major that does interest them. You end up with a lot of families spending their disposable income on supplementary education, family relationships distorted and warped due to the pressure to academically keep up with the Joneses. 

Sure, Korea takes things to extremes, but it’s still a cautionary example. I don’t see Kane talking about any costs of increased schooling up front, much less how paying those costs in exchange for a little more productivity among our kids could well prolong the process of emotional recovery that young people, like all of us, need to work on. For that reason, it’s hard for me to take Kane seriously.