A study of 5 and 6-year-old schoolchildren in England has found thousands of children “lagging” in speech development (https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/11/08/britain-sees-spike-in-children-requiring-speech-support-after-lockdown/) and “struggling to express themselves” because they don’t know how.
It’s up 10 % from last year.
Scotland is having similar problems.
Now, before we jump on the bandwagon for “See what happens when children are deprived of public school!”, let’s ask ourselves: “Could people communicate okay before there were public schools?” Like, what public school did David go to, before he wrote the Psalms? Or Livy, before he wrote the history of Rome? Seems to me the human race did just fine for several millenia before public education came along.
We learn to talk not from school, but from hearing people talk, from them talking to us and to each other–from extended family members, neighbors, other children, the clerk at the grocery store… you know! All that regular daily living stuff!
Ah! The Great Lockdown didn’t just deprive the kids of public school. It also deprived them of normal everyday interactions with all sorts of people, all kinds of interactions–that suffer when you have to wear a stupid mask, stand at least six feet away (should we have learned semaphore?), can’t go out without saying “May I?” to Big Brother, no movies, no sporting events, no kids’ games on the street. Just stuck indoors all day.
Did that make a lot of kids weird? Doesn’t seem impossible to me!
Wait’ll these kids get old enough to understand that you don’t dare say A Wrong Thing, better just shut up! Say what They want… or else!
How did we ever permit this wicked foolishness to go this far?