2024-02-03 09:00:00
School authorities fear for the beautiful eyes of our children. It is true that looking directly at a solar eclipse, even just for a glance, can damage your eyesight, sometimes irreparably.
As the eclipse will occur at the time of return home, when children are piling up on buses – therefore without much supervision – the authorities did not want to take any risk.
We’re closing the shop!
And I think that, unfortunately, the school authorities succumbed to fear in adopting such a radical solution.
However, there is a way to manage risks and make this unique celestial phenomenon a great learning opportunity for schoolchildren. By wanting to protect children at all costs, we are not always doing them a favor!
I remember my first solar eclipse very well. I must have been 9 or 10 years old, I was so excited. “A solar eclipse, like in Tintin’s Temple of the Sun,” I told my mother. I quickly became disillusioned when I saw the reports on TV. The phenomenon carried certain dangers.
If we viewed the eclipse from the front, the light burned the retina of the eye, causing lesions or even irreparable damage to our eyesight. The Sun might make you blind! Of course, blindness was sometimes only temporary. The problem is that you won’t know if the blindness is temporary…
In my childhood mind, the eclipse had suddenly become a concrete threat. I compared her to the Medusa of Greek mythology capable of petrifying any mortal who has the impudence to meet her gaze. The eclipse was a Medusa to whom it was better to bow.
I was terrified, but at the same time, I felt like I might handle the risk. After all, the general instructions were simple: unless you were equipped with protective glasses, you had to avoid looking at the sun in the face at all costs.
Nothing rocket science compared to the health instructions of the last pandemic with its red, orange, green zones, its curfews, its thousand more or less contradictory rules…
So much so that when the sky darkened in the middle of the followingnoon, that famous day of the eclipse, I did the only thing to do: I lowered my gaze to avoid meeting that of a jellyfish.
A child was capable of understanding this back then. Why would our children today be incapable of it?
Yet this is the message we are sending them by confining them in their thousands to their homes on April 8.
I understand that the issue is delicate for very young children. Despite clear instructions, their natural curiosity may take over at a time when there is very little supervision.
But otherwise, close all schools? Including secondary schools? Even Public Health, although so puritanical at times, did not ask for so much.
The Canadian Pediatric Society rightly warned us, at the end of January, once morest the danger of overprotecting our children. His opinion related to “risky gambling”, but I think we can extrapolate it to other situations in everyday life.
The general idea of the study was that children have been playing less freely outdoors in recent years because safety measures now aim to prevent all play-related injuries, rather than just serious injuries.
It’s as if our society can no longer tolerate the slightest risk. However, it is important to expose the child to situations that frighten him. This allows him to experience uncertainty, to test his limits… He gains benefits such as better self-esteem, greater concentration, less anxiety…
Of course this decision to close schools comes from a good feeling. It’s because we love them, our little ones. It’s a roundregarding way of telling them that we care regarding them. But it’s like when we see our youngest venture into the spider, at the local park. As soon as he pretends to climb a little too high, we hurry to contain his enthusiasm: not too high, not too fast, be careful! As a parent, I plead guilty, I did it.
But we don’t always realize that the child who receives these repeated little warnings can end up understanding: you, the adult, don’t trust me. You think I can’t handle risk. Afterwards, we are surprised to see them so anxious and lacking in autonomy.
Of course, the difficulty is always determining how much of the risk can be left to children to manage. In the case of the solar eclipse, it seems to me that the oldest are largely capable of it. Let’s trust them. If I were a science teacher, I would take the opportunity to buy protective glasses for the whole class and I would pay for an observation session outside.
The last time a total solar eclipse was observed in the region was in 1972. Such an occasion comes once or twice a century. Let’s make the most of it instead of letting ourselves be paralyzed by fear.
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