The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy. — William Hazlitt
The Chicago Tribune wants you to believe that “remote learning” has crept back into our schools like some undead remnant of the COVID era, re-thrusting that 2020–21 trauma upon us in a mere 24 hours. Children zombified in front of screens, parents reduced to unpaid teaching assistants, entire families pushed to the brink of their nineteenth nervous breakdowns as their children play Minecraft behind their glassy-eyed teachers’ backs.
Put more simply, their January 23 editorial on a rare cold-day school closure urges districts to reject “remote learning” entirely, even for a single day, and to return instead to the purity of the snow days of our misspent youth. You remember those halcyon snow days — the ones we bitterly cursed when we had to make them up in June.
It may be a compelling narrative, but it’s profoundly dishonest.
The Tribune’s argument depends on a sleight of hand so blitheringly obvious it’s downright insulting: their editorial board deliberately conflates pandemic-era, months-long school shutdowns with today’s state-approved, tightly bounded emergency e-learning days. These are not the same thing. They are not remotely the same thing. And the Tribune knows this, or should have known it.
Let’s start with the facts the Tribune chose not to report.
In Illinois, e-learning days are governed by state-approved district plans. These plans are not improvised, open-ended wild thought experiments. They are constrained, formal, and limited.
In districts like Aurora D131, the plan allows for no more than five e-learning days per year. Parents must be notified in advance of the day’s assignments. Students complete the work independently. Teachers are available via Zoom during defined hours — typically the normal school day — to assist students who need help. There are no six-hour Zoom marathons. There is no attempt to “replicate school online.” And there is no pretense that this is equivalent to in-person instruction.
This is not COVID remote learning. It is emergency continuity planning.
The Tribune’s editorial never explains this. Instead, it opens by invoking the emotional wreckage of the pandemic’s “dark days,” “tears shed,” “burned out and exhausted”— and then declares, without qualification, “We should not go back. Not even for a day.” Back to what? The piece never says, because naming the actual policy would destroy their argument.
This is not an oversight. It’s yellow journalism at its finest.
By refusing to distinguish between long-term shutdowns and short-term emergency e-learning, the Tribune creates a strawman version of “remote learning” that no district is actually proposing. It then knocks that strawman over and pats itself on the back for defending children everywhere.
The result isn’t just sloppy opinion writing. It’s a complete failure of even the most mediocre journalism, something the Trib seems to subscribe to on a regular basis these days.
Consider the Tribune’s absolutist line: “Either students are in school or they are not.” This sounds decisive until you think about it for more than 2.768 seconds. Schools already operate on gradients. Half days. Testing days. Independent work days. Substitute days. Assembly days. Homework itself is, by definition, asynchronous learning. Pretending that education only exists in one pure, physical state or not at all is not seriousness. It actually sounds a lot like Donald Trump.
Worse yet, the Tribune’s position actively ignores the real tradeoffs districts face. If conditions are unsafe, with wind chills approaching minus 30, buses that won’t start, and sidewalks that risk injury, districts have two choices. They can either cancel the day entirely, pushing the calendar deeper into June, or they can use one of a small number of state-approved e-learning days to maintain continuity.
There is no magic third option where safety, scheduling, and instruction are all preserved without compromise.
But the editorial board waves this away with a bizarre nostalgia for the snow day, as if a lost instructional day has no cost. It does. And those costs inevitably fall unevenly, hitting working parents, hourly employees, and families without flexible childcare hardest. Like the students in mostly minority D131.
Ironically, the same inequities the Tribune consistently claims to care so much about are worsened by the solution it champions. And if that wasn’t bad enough, then there’s this hypocrisy.
Where was this moral clarity when districts were closing for weeks and months at a time during the pandemic? Where was the Tribune’s insistence that “a day behind a screen is a day lost” then? Where were these editorials excoriating prolonged closures, shifting goalposts, and mitigation theater that did real harm to students who still haven’t recovered?
Where was the fucking Tribune when this (classical Evanston) liberal columnist was the only one making those arguments in real time, often loudly and at great professional cost. Oh! I remember, they were running editorials from overblown, self-aggrandizing, power hungry medical “professionals” who got COVID wrong every fucking step of the way.
Now, years later, with the benefit of hindsight and the safety of distance, the paper suddenly discovers its moral backbone. It condemns “remote learning creep” not as it actually exists today, but as a ghost of 2020 conveniently resurrected for rhetorical effect. That’s not courage. It’s chickenshit revisionism.
What’s especially galling is the Tribune didn’t need to take this path. A responsible editorial could have asked some eminently reasonable questions: Are districts using e-learning sparingly? Are assignments age-appropriate? Are families without reliable internet being supported? Is there evidence these days are helping more than hurting? That would have required reporting, nuance, and engagement with actual policy, none of which have survived in today’s Tribune op-ed pages.
Instead, the Tribune chose trauma recycling and false equivalencies.
Emergency e-learning days are not a return to pandemic schooling. They are a narrow tool, used sparingly, to manage extreme conditions without pretending that lost days don’t matter. Treating them as a moral failing is not advocacy. It’s a lazy nostalgia masquerading as principle.
If the Tribune really wants to argue about education, perhaps it should start by describing the world as it is, not as it’s convenient to remember. And they might want to consider losing the hypocrisy while they’re at it.
