A year and a half ago, I was sitting in my AP Biology class learning about organelles within cells. We learned about the mitochondria, ribosomes, nuclei, the Golgi apparatus, and countless other parts that make up a cell. Not a single student in the class ever questioned the credibility of our teacher or our textbooks. There were sources: videos produced by Harvard, articles by world-renowned scientists, our AP class curriculum created by professionals. We learned the material, studied, did a few labs, and took the test.
Yet here we are, a year later, and some of the same students in my AP Biology class are suddenly questioning the validity of the CDC, masks, and even the vaccine. These same people took our AP Biology test on organelles without question; we all knew what we were learning was fact. Within weeks of the pandemic first hitting, science has become something that is unexpectedly up for debate.
While it is crucial to ask questions and challenge thoughts and opinions (which is essentially how our knowledge as a human race grows), certain things are undoubtedly factual. For example, our planet Earth is round. Thousands of people still believe the Earth is flat. They have come up with theories, explanations, but every astrologer with an adequate education has proven them otherwise. Dozens of years of research went into Eratosthenes (no, it wasn’t Christopher Columbus!) proving the Earth’s shape. For centuries to come, there would be doubts, but time after time again, astrologers agreed with Eratosthenes. Two thousand years later, we know that Earth having a spherical shape is a fact—even astronauts have confirmed this with images from space! Anyone who doubts factual information is either uneducated (which is another problem that needs to be addressed by the country) or outright wrong. Now, to make this more relevant: Masks protect against COVID-19. Millions of people have disagreed with this statement, but science proves in favor of mask-wearing. The proof: if you stand in front of someone with COVID who sneezes in your face, you are very likely to catch it. It is only logical that wearing a mask would create a small barrier between yourself and the COVID molecules, and is undoubtedly safer than not having anything to protect you at all (check out the study here).
As someone who plans to be an educator in the future, I’ve begun to wonder how COVID-19 will be portrayed in textbooks 20 or 30 years from now, when primary, secondary, and even some college-level students wouldn’t have been alive to witness the pandemic themselves. Centuries ago, European schools taught students that the Earth was flat, even though many Greek astrologers had already proven otherwise. Will the seriousness of COVID-19 be up for debate in science and history classes in the coming decades? Will teachers be allowed to state the facts, or will statements like “masks prevented COVID-19 from spreading” be considered too political or opinionated? The question that worries me the most of all: Will the events that occurred in 2020 be considered fact or fiction?
There have been 2,854,276 COVID-19 related deaths worldwide as of April 6, 2021. Will some people deny the 2.8 million lives lost so far? I fear that when I become a teacher, I will have to bite my tongue when teaching students about the pandemic. I fear that facts will no longer be considered “neutral” in a classroom setting. We’ve seen it already in the past year: teachers worried about parent backlash regarding class discussions around the capital insurrection on January 6, 2021. The actions taken by citizens storming the U.S. Capitol that day were illegal — and that is a fact. Yet, our educators, the people we count on to teach us about the world and prepare us for life after high school, are now fearful they will lose their jobs for teaching the truth.
Katin Sarner is an 18-year-old writer from Los Angeles, California. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Pear Shaped Press, Harpur Palate, and Herstry.
