I learned something on Saturday.

Either the members of The New York Times editorial board are easily startled or they are all childless. There isn’t any other way to explain why these highly educated scribes were shocked to learn that closing schools across the nation during covid was a catastrophic decision.

Yet, in an editorial headlined “The Startling Evidence On Learning Loss Is In,” these Mensa members expressed amazement that American students are sinking in a morass of academic failure, chronic absenteeism and depression due to school lockdowns.

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

How could this possibly be startling? Those of us who didn’t attend prestigious institutions of learning predicted this on Day One of the school lockdowns. We begged governors NOT to close schools and then to reopen them quickly after the first two weeks.

Remember, from the start, we knew that children were largely unaffected by the covid virus.

Nevertheless, when we argued that it was madness to sacrifice children and their futures for an illness that was most dangerous for the elderly and infirm, we  were shouted down. We were called grandma killers. Covidiots. Many of those who spoke out were banned on social media.

As time wore on, it was the teachers unions that lobbied to KEEP schools closed, despite the fact that teachers had elbowed geriatrics out of the way to be the first in line for vaccines.

Caring teachers who wanted to get back to class were cowed into silence by their union reps. Some talked to the press, however, telling us about teens who were home all day not doing school work, but babysitting younger siblings while their parents worked. Other students just disappeared. Many stayed in bed during Zoom classes.

A few weeks into the pandemic I talked to a teenaged girl working the cash register at my local supermarket. Since it had already been announced that grades wouldn’t count for the remainder of the year, she’d essentially left school and was working full time.

She wasn’t the only one. Teenagers with cars were earning extra money delivering food and essentials to people hiding under their beds, and demanding that society lockdown even longer.

Beyond the stunning academic failures that resulted from closed schools, Times editors are now scratching their heads over the epidemic of absenteeism that continues to sweep the nation. In some places, like Oakland, CA 61% of students are chronically absent.

Last year, more than 1/4 of all American students missed more than 10% of school days, earning themselves the chronically absent label.

You don’t need a PhD to figure this one out: When governors closed schools for months on end they essentially told students that school was unimportant.

Young people believed these little dictators. The consequences for this under-educated, unmotivated, suicidal and depressed generation will be felt for years.

Where are the apologies?

We are owed big mea culpas from the following: From the CDC for its boneheaded recommendations. From the governors who were quick to close schools and slow to reopen them. (Looking at you, Ralph Northam.) From the teachers unions, school boards and school superintendents who fought parents who wanted their kids back in school. From editorial writers at virtually every newspaper in the country who supported unconstitutional closures and endless school lockdowns without employing their common sense.

There needs to be a reckoning for what these fools did to an entire generation. Being startled is a start, I suppose.