It's time to end magical thinking about schools - and thank our teachers

It's not good enough to simply tell independent schools they must reopen or risk government funding, as we hear the national cabinet may be considering. We need to think things through in a way that understands the environment in which our schools and teachers are operating, and determine which approach works best given that.

Sometimes things are so obvious they are worth saying. So, let me say some things about our teachers and our schools.

The courage and dedication of Australian school teachers, staff and leaders is extraordinary.

Ordinarily, they have demanding jobs that can only be done with a sense of vocation. But now, the demands and pressures are not just huge. The demands - like pandemic numbers - have grown exponentially - and our teachers are still functioning, not just well, but in a remarkable and more than admirable way.

We are all thinking, as we should, about our doctors, nurses and other health and aged care staff who are putting themselves at daily risk to help others in our community. We are rightly concerned about how to protect, support and supplement them as the crisis worsens. That's as it must be. It's a national priority.

In all the discussion about keeping schools open or closed, though, we haven't paid enough attention to what teachers are coping with and what risk they are being exposed to on our behalf.

That needs to change. There will be many things that can't or shouldn't go back to how they were after the pandemic, and our approach to our schools and our teachers must be one of these, to all our benefit.

We have asked our teachers to do things in recent weeks that we might refuse to do ourselves. We seem not to have noticed the extraordinary nature of our demands. And we also seem not to have valued the amazing fact that our teachers have simply accepted the burdens and done incredible new things, just to keep operating when many other institutions and businesses haven't.

Teachers are dealing with all the personal risks, anxieties and changes that the rest of us are, and they're putting all that aside to teach and protect our children.

Like other front-line emergency services and health workers, they are running towards the problem, while many of the rest of us get to run away.

Think about what it's like in our schools now. We tell ourselves there is "social distancing" and measures are being taken to implement the best hygiene protocols. The hygiene measures are hard, but they are the easy bit.

Do we really think kindergarten and young primary school kids can even comprehend the idea of staying away from friends and teachers, and do so systematically? And do we actually expect our high school young adults to also be systematic in behaviours that are so alien to how they live their lives? Yet we expect teachers to transform how all of these children and young adults behave and function each day at school. Our self-deception is what Joan Didion described as magical thinking, and it's placing an enormous and probably unbearable burden on our teachers and school staff.

The advice of epidemiologists on COVID-19 is still emerging, although early statistics do show a clear pattern showing that the school student population is not at the heightened risk of hospitalisation and death from the virus other parts of our population face.

But there's a lot we don't know, including how infectious different demographic chunks of our population are, even if they only experience mild symptoms themselves. Schools, though, are simply and unavoidably places where volumes of people - teachers, children, support staff and parents - mix and mingle. That means they have some core attributes that are worrying during a pandemic. The obvious contrast with restrictions elsewhere creates anxiety and drives fear, as we saw in the vibrant social media and public debate on school closures.

Then there is the uncertainty of what each new day's restrictions and broader social measures mean for how our schools must operate. Simply saying they are open doesn't solve the problem.

New rules in other areas of life have echo effects for our schools, and create new questions from parents and for teachers.

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On top of this, in the disturbing and destabilising days we are all living through, the anger that some parents direct at teachers hasn't gone away. This appears to have grown with parents' anxieties. Our teachers are coping with this now too.

Finally, keeping some schools open while allowing parents to take children out for online schooling gives teachers two jobs - the one they had before the pandemic teaching a physical class, and the new one of delivering daily online teaching simultaneously to children at home. That's industrial relations reform at a level, speed and scale that far exceeds WorkChoices. Just on the ICT element, it's asking teachers and schools to set up home working services for 100s of students, while small businesses struggle to do this for much smaller work teams.

There is no pat answer to this. Some things can be said and done, though.

Much greater public acknowledgment from our political and private sector leaders of our teachers and school staff will help, because we know that simply saying we see an issue helps people cope.

Funding threats don't fit here.

Instead of telling all schools they must reopen, one option that seems to make more sense in managing the risks of infection is to set up some schools to operate despite the risk of community-driven infection.

Such schools would be exclusively for the children of essential service workers - not defined as "anyone in a job", but in a way that is about critical services and infrastructure. We could transform those schools into places that don't look much like the open and mingling institutions they still are now, and equip and support the teachers who run them much differently to now - with masks, protective equipment and protocols and skilled staff other than teachers to make this work.

We could also use ICT professionals, including those whose have lost jobs elsewhere, to help schools shift to and run online teaching. Content and interaction should be teachers' focus, not making the IT work.

In the recovery from the changes and dangers of the pandemic, we must do more than just get schools "back to normal". We will need to rethink our societal approach to our teachers, and invest in and value them as we do other critical professions. That call has been made before, but it looks unavoidable when we see how they have been asked to perform now, and how magnificently they are responding to that call.