Parents and day care operators in Ontario are struggling with permission for day care centres to open again tomorrow (June 12) with all that it takes actually to be ready for that. Also, here in Ontario, the government has announced plans for postsecondary schools to open in the summer for students, particularly this year’s grads, to complete their school year, schools having closed in March.
Beyond the logistics involved in these developments, it strikes me there is a common concern between the near end of schooling and care before it even begins: How to have healthy, whole humans, equipped for a world that will very quickly–again and repeatedly–become unrecognizable?
The specific knowledge and skills carefully and thoroughly to be developed need bearing in the special vessel of our acknowledged interdependent humanity.
Signs of hope among some leaders of today: Mayors Keisha Lance Bottoms (Atlanta) and Muriel Bowser (District of Columbia), Prime Ministers Yacinda Ardern (New Zealand) and Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), Dr. Bonnie Henry, Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia, and (take note of the name for future reference) Chika Stacy Oriuwa, 2020 University of Toronto medical school valedictorian. Note that even to this white male retired pastor from an agrarian patriarchal religion, it is women who come to mind.
There is hope in such leadership, and for each of us. I (still) find it expressed: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2a).