Dave Grohl, son of a school teacher, speaks out against reopening schools in new Atlantic op-ed
Aux Features Music
The White House wants teachers and kids back in school this fall, the insatiable, boneyard belly of the government hungry for more blood sacrifices from a population just trying to get through a pandemic that many officials aren’t taking nearly seriously enough. This is not a good idea for many reasons, especially in light of the US’ general failure to contain the virus without adding schools into the mix.
Dave Grohl—a guy irritatingly good at drumming, playing guitar, singing, being a nice guy, and now, as his monthly Atlantic articles show, writing about current events—has used his latest article to speak out against the plan to go ahead with re-opening in September.
He comes to the topic as the son of a retired public school teacher who “tirelessly devoted her life to the service of others.” Grohl writes about how difficult the job is for people like his mom, who already work in spite of infrastructural problems like overcrowded and underfunded classrooms. In interviewing her for the piece, Grohl describes the aspects of the job she’s most concerned that teachers will have to deal with: “masks and distancing, temperature checks, crowded busing, crowded hallways, sports, air-conditioning systems, lunchrooms, public restrooms, janitorial staff.”
Though Grohl notes the difficulties faced by continuing with remote learning, “especially for working-class and single parents,” he says reopening schools before we’re ready “in the name of rosy optics” would “be foolish to do” and would be “at the expense of our children, teachers, and schools.”
“America’s teachers are caught in a trap, set by indecisive and conflicting sectors of failed leadership that have never been in their position and can’t possibly relate to the unique challenges they face,” he writes. “Teachers want to teach, not die, and we should support and protect them like the national treasures that they are.”
Read Grohl’s entire article at The Atlantic or listen to him reading the piece in an audio version hosted on Foo Fighters’ Soundcloud.
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83 Comments
There goes my hero.
Flashback, 1993: “Can you imagine if the fucking drummer for Nirvana wrote the songs? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I remember having an argument with my girlfriend in late 1994 about whether Dave Grohl or Tre Cool was a better drummer.
The answer is Matt Cameron
actually, dave abbruzzese ruled them all.
Factually incorrect.
matt cameron in soundgarden? beautifulmatt cameron in pearl jam? no.
Agreed that Pearl Jam Matt Cameron is like third-tier Cameron at best, but the topic isn’t “Pearl Jam drummers” so Soundgarden Cameron top of the top shelfJesus Christ Pose
Like Suicide
Fresh Tendrils
The Day I Tried To Live
Searching With My Good Eye Closed
4th of July
and so on
well, the OT had nothing to do with matt cameron at all, so *shrug*soundgarden was my favourite band from the 90s, but i love abbruzzese’s style. shame he didn’t stick around the scene.
Ahem. Matt F*cking Cameron. But between he and Dave… Temple of the Dog, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Foos, QotSA (in spurts), Them Crooked Vultures… and more side projects. And both good stand-up dudes.
Nah. Jack Irons.
Objectively false.
I’m not familiar with Tre but I am a fan of Dave’s drumming
Tre Cool (real name: Frank Edwin Wright III) is the drummer for Green Day.
Ah ok. I still prefer Grohl.
Cave Drool, no question
The only one who could ever reach me.Was the son of a teacher (wo)man.
It’s a well written piece. Dave showing once again why he’s one of the coolest guys in rock.
Republicans: Celebrities, who cares what they say unless they’re really IMPORTANT celebrities like Scott Baio, then they can speak at our CONVENTION.
Nothing will top the old man talks to empty chair routine.
Yes that didn’t pan out but…Clint Eastwood is a real star. Having him up there was unwise but doesn’t really speak to what fame whores they are and pretend not to be. Unlike Scott Baio and Ronald Reagan. He also can actually do his job (even if some of his movies are terrible) and isn’t a total fraud like DJT.
Cool, will Dave pay me for the daycare since my wife and I both work?
There are sooo many baby-shitters out there who are so tired of doing the job of parenting they never fully took seriously before and have their cold little hearts set on shipping their monsters off to the underpaid baby sitters more commonly known as teachers. Guess what? They are on to you and they want none of this shit. It’s not worth dying for. A lot of them are looking at leaves of absence, prolonged sick leave and even premature retirement because they can smell this turd show from miles away. You fuckers wouldn’t back them up when their kids were on their phones in the middle of class and there is no way in hell you’ll have their backs on this. Hell, schools can’t even find substitute teachers for the Fall and that was a good gig for a lot of people. Let’s also keep in mind how every school system’s budget would already be a disaster even if we had all stayed home and this thing was winding down. How do you think they could possibly afford to retool their buildings and add the staff necessary to even attempt reopening?If your hick state school does reopen don’t think it’s going to last more than a month and also don’t expect the grandparents to want to have anything to do with the grandkids if they do step back into the petri dish. Welcome to fucksville.
To which fuckers are you referring?
I’m convinced! You are an ignorant dipshit!
You ARE great, Willow!
And you’re probably one of the hobby parents they are referring to. Kids are great….as long as someone else is taking care of them for you 80% of the time right?
Jesus Christ man. Yes reopening schools is a gravely bad idea but there are good reasons for people to want them open whether it being worried about kids losing out on education to just needing to go to work to pay for food and have nowhere to put their kids.
Yeah man, public schools are useless and have no benefits for kids. It doesn’t matter one way or the other whether kids go or not. That sure is a take, alright.
At no point did Praxinoscope say public schools are useless or have no benefits for kids, so the take that you are scoffing at is one you made up.
No, his comment just presupposes that the only reason parents want their kids in school is to get them out of the house, and not that there could be legitimate reasons to want in-person schooling this fall.
There are no legitimate reasons to open any schools.
This is a profoundly dumb comment.
Yours aren’t better.
Have you considered shutting the fuck up?
The schools should stay closed, but this whole situation has really sucked for working parents. Schools have never been closed for more than a snow day or two in living memory. Two-income households need the schools open so the parents can focus on work, and need to keep both incomes to pay the mortgage and buy food.It’s fair to be angry at parents who are insisting that schools open up even though it’s not safe, but schools are and always have been public childcare, and the lack of schooling has created a childcare crisis without precedent. And the government’s failure to contain the pandemic, which has made it unsafe to open schools, is a genuine breach of the social contract. Working parents have paid taxes their whole lives to fund the school system, with the understanding that it would always be there to allow both parents to have careers, and it’s not there for us when we need it.
You sound like a teenage emo hate machine so fueled and clouded by your hormones that you are choking on them. Completely oblivious to the world around you beyond your own nose. There are so many variables to this equation that you are missing that it is embarrassing for even a stranger like myself to watch the diarrhea flying out of your misguided and uneducated mouth. I feel extreme pity for you, and hope one day you get the slightest of clues.
In addition to being the song of a school teacher, Dave Grohl is a dad-rocker.
Song of a Schoolteacher, I like that
Dammit, stupid fat fingers! I should know better than commenting from a phone like a goddamn savage.
He’ll always be the third member of Tenacious D to me.
Hey, don’t forget about Lee!
Dammit Dave, how can I stop loving you???You keep showing up in the news as a decent thoughtful human being!
Sounds like Mr. Grohl might be using some of that common sense stuff that the good Lord gave him.Dave Grohl for president!
I read a comment on Facebook , from a fucking nurse of all people, who said teachers and students need to back off to school and how if she has to put her life on the line, for a job so should everyone else. People just suck.
You know, fuck that nurse. People do suck. My daughter is a school teacher and she literally did put her life on the line last year when two shithead students at her school decided it would be a good idea to show up with guns and start shooting people. For over an hour, she was prepared to do whatever she needed to do to protect 20+ six year olds in the event some asshole with a gun came through her classroom door.
It breaks my heart that at the start of her career (she’s 25), she’s already had to deal with a school shooting and now she has to deal with being forced into a situation where she’s at a higher risk of catching a deadly virus.
You know, fuck that nurse. People do suck. My daughter is a school
teacher and she literally did put her life on the line last year when two
shithead students at her school decided it would be a good idea to show up with
guns and start shooting people. For over an hour, she was prepared to do
whatever she needed to do to protect 20+ six year olds in the event some
asshole with a gun came through her classroom door. It breaks my heart that at the start of her career (she’s 25), she’s
already had to deal with a school shooting and now she has to deal with being
forced into a situation where she’s at a higher risk of catching a deadly
virus.
Seriously. One thing this pandemic has shown is that there are many, many nurses out there who don’t have the slightest clue when it comes to empathy and nurturing, what I used to think nursing was all about. Fucking 2020 won’t be happy until it has ruined everything and everybody for us. With an assist from Facebook.
Medical workers are like anyone else: some are great and some are assholes who got into the wrong profession.
I have come to realize this. I had a “higher calling” view of all nurses up til now. I was very, very wrong.
Gonna let you know a secret about nurses. Some graduate top of their class and others graduate on the bottom. A lot of bad covid-19 advise is coming from bottom of the class shit nurses. Most of them don’t even work directly with patients anymore, the administration figures out the real shitty ones pretty quick and puts them on paperwork duty or they fall in with jobs for some shitty private practice ran by an old ass, probably shit, doctor.Nurses can be the best thing to happen to you when you are sick, some are truly amazing people. But some are complete assholes who will contradict everything doctors say and form their own shitty opinions on how to treat you, despite that not actually being their job.
I can’t recall who said it, but what do you call the guy that graduated at the bottom of his medical school class?Doctor. I keep this in mind whenever I encounter a complete asshole in any field.
I have Facebook”friend” nurse who is passing along just dangerously irresponsible medical advice. Like “Covid can be prevented by organic food” bad. It’s terrifying, and I don’t know how she’s licensed.
I saw someone claiming to be a nurse on the Nextdoor app ranting about how COVID-19 was all just a smoke screen to get us all to be vaccinated with a microchip. I pray every night to the dark gods that she was not, in fact, a medical professional
The ones at the bottom are the ones that tell you to wear a mask but are happy to go out to dinner every night all over town or go on vacation to Corona virus hotspots and go out to dinner every night with everyone else in town while the local ER beds are all taken up by COVID19 cases. And they are posting it all over Facebook.. Not that I know a cousin of mine that does that……
They said that is one of the biggest issue with encouraging mask wearing. Idiots think they make you immune to the disease.
My dad’s a doctor and he’s acting like a spoilt “Ken” because a lot of places are still closed, or only open in a limited capacity. His logic is that because he’s surrounded by people all day and work never stopped for him, he doesn’t get why everywhere else is vacant.
Much better use of his time than denying the link between HIV and AIDS.
Heh. I was tempted to mention this but he’s totally in the right here so fair enough.
I was like, “Do I rise above my base instincts and be the better person? No, that’s for other people.”
I think that’s a Nate Mendel thing, and Dave’s band supporting his band mate’s crazy fringe views. And for the record, Nate thinks people just aren’t getting ALL the information they need to remain safe. I’ve read Taylor is anti-vax, so let’s not pretend Dave is the one pushing the pseudoscience here. Sometimes people just believe one too many conspiracy theories, that’s not the same as being anti-gay or denying AIDS or whatever these headlines imply.
That was Nate Mendel, not Dave.
I wasn’t aware that Mendel had sole control of the Foo Fighters website and Grohl had absolutely no say in what got published there.
One is able to have a say in what gets published and also allow other people to also have a say in what also gets published.This issue has been brought up and addressed many times. It was Medel that got involved with Alive and well 20 years ago. It was Medel that insisted they get support, and it was the rest of the band that retracted said support, again – like 20 years ago.
One is able to have a say in what gets published and also allow other people to also have a say in what also gets published.And that would make one… how do you say… complicit.
…and once the entire scope of Alive and Well was realized, they cut their ties.Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Here in the chi-town burbs I am at, we had the option for our kids to choose virtual learning for the first trimester or to sign up for “integrated” learning where they will attempt to put kids in school, with social distancing, at least a few days a week, assuming things don’t get super bad. Even though my little guy is starting kindergarten we felt the risk was to high to us and to staff and opted for virtual learning. This push to put kids back in school is insane and goes directly against Trump and his idiot education secretaries “school choice” initiatives which heavily push home school learning. What the fuck do they think home schooling is exactly?
My daughter has done really badly with any attempts at video conference-based learning so far (like, always ends in tears/refusal to log on), so I’m torn. She’s starting kindergarten in the fall also. If they can do alternating days, or something, that might work, since I’d be walking her to school myself…? I dunno, it’s hard to weigh the options. The school sent out a survey about how likely we’d be to send her in, and I couldn’t give a definitive answer to basically any question, because there weren’t enough specifics about what measures they’d be taking to isolate groups from each other, clean shared spaces, etc. So, just maybes all down the board.
That’s honesty why we picked virtual leaning for the first trimester. They couldn’t tell how exactly they were going to do in person learning, just vague answers about limited class size and social distancing. We homeschooled my older son for several years because of school issues around how they handled his mental health issues(basically he scored great in standardized tests so they couldn’t care less that he has such crippling social anxiety we couldn’t get him to go to class most days.). So we have experience and are equipped to help with educating at home. Once we got him home and worked with him for a few years he made his triumph return to public school to start Jr high lasts year only to end up back home before the school year was out because of Covid-19. As far as my youngest with zoom learning. Both my kids have been doing language learning remotely with people for a couple years so assuming they can keep him engaged I think he will do okay. But we will see
That’s bc they have no plan, as of 7/22. Their plan is a miracle. Keep the kid home for 6 weeks, see what comes next.
Yeah, I’m definitely not sending her in until they’ve presented a full plan that I’m comfortable with. Things are pretty stable covid-wise here at the moment, but that’s liable to change at any time given what a dumpster fire other states are.
I feel so bad for the parents and teachers of the really little kids (and kids with learning differences and/or those learning English). I was a high school English teacher, so moving online wouldn’t have been too big of an issue for me. But I don’t even know how you’d go about doing effective distance ed for the littles.
We will find out in less then a month. I have to imagine is short story time things and then at home activists ran by a parent. It can’t be 6 hour of littles watching a screen
An approach directly profitable to the deVos cartel?
Thank you to Dave Grohl because nearly every politician, mainstream and alternative media outlet, and person-on-Facebook has forgotten that there are teachers and tons of other staff in school buildings. Distance learning has more problems than even what is typically brought up, but so far the return plans coming out are vague and confusing, and I know that a lot of people who work in schools are frustrated and worried.
But if they don’t go to school, how will they learn about The Colours and The Shapes?
Without shop class, how will they learn how to use a Monkey Wrench?
Back home, when they learn to fly.
I am VERY glad my Mother retired from being a school teacher 2 years ago. That she lives in a red state means she would have been more than likely to have had to go back to school. What an absolutely horrible idea. If I were a teacher and was forced to go back I would have quit. And if I had kids they sure as hell wouldn’t be going back to school.
It’s depressing, but not surprising. Our society doesn’t fund schools, doesn’t support families or workers, sends thoughts and prayers after shootings. Why would a public health emergency be any different? I used to be a high school teacher and as much as I miss it, I am so very glad I’m no longer in the classroom.Reopening will kill people: students, staff, teachers, members of their households.
I love Dave Grohl. He seems like a good person, and is truly passionate about rock and roll, which is one of my favorite things in this world. Because of this I have tried time and time again to get into his music, but it just doesn’t do it for me for whatever reason. I always feel guilty about this.
School in the U.S. sucks anyway
If I were a millionaire I would maybe keep my kids home too. For poor people this just isn’t a real option, kids need to go back to school.