Dr. Phil On Shutting Down Schools Because Of COVID: ‘It’s Like Throwing Gas On A Fire’

 Dr. Phillip C. McGraw, commonly known as Dr. Phil, said during a recent discussion with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that government officials who decided to shut down schools during the COVID pandemic were “throwing gas on a fire” in terms of exacerbating the existing problems facing America’s youth.

The second half of McGraw’s remarks during a special appearance on Cruz’s “Verdict” podcast last week were released on Tuesday.

“Right now, almost a third of fifth and eighth graders can’t read at the most fundamental level,” McGraw said. “They can’t read a sentence. And the question is, how did they get in the fifth grade? How did they get into the eighth grade? 19% of high school graduates can’t read. They cannot read.”

“How do you graduate high school, if you can’t read in the first, second, and third grade?” McGraw continued. “From the fourth grade on you read to learn. So, if you don’t learn to read in those first three grades, you don’t have that tool to learn for the rest of your life. And if teachers are going to pass them either way, then you’re just setting them up to fail.”

McGraw said he was called an “idiot” when he spoke out against shutting schools down for more than a couple of weeks and said remote teaching would do more damage to society than the virus itself.

“I think I’ve got 15 clips of different times that I said, shutting this country down and taking our kids out of school for a prolonged period of time and the epidemiological pediatricians estimate that it will cost somewhere around 15 million years of life lost for these kids,” he said. “And they figure that because you got roughly 50 million kids in public school plus the private schools and because of what they lost; they will never close that gap.”

McGraw explained how students missing that time in school would lead to them achieving less academically, leading to less appealing job opportunities later.

 

“Lesser jobs are usually higher risk jobs because they’re blue collar and they’re working with machinery and construction and things where they get injured,” he said. “They have poorer health coverage, which means they get slower diagnosis and lesser care. And so, it obtains with years of life shaved off the end of their lives. And what gets me is they did this, the same agencies that advocated for this are the same agencies that had the records that said, we have the highest levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness among our children than we’ve had since records were being kept. So, let’s shut down the schools, which we know are essential to their development. It’s like throwing gas on a fire.”

McGraw also noted that by keeping children out of schools, there was likely an uptick in the amount of abuse that some faced at home because the programs that exist in schools for reporting such acts were not available.

“We simply abandoned them to their abusers,” he said. “And so many of these children relied on those schools for at least one if not two meals per day. We took that away, and some say well, but they delivered those meals, some got them delivered, some didn’t. So, we created a huge educational gap. We abandoned the abused and molested children to their abusers and molesters. And nobody has done anything to close the gap. Other than that, no problem.”

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