The harm that school closures have done to children has vastly outweighed any benefits they may have had for public health. At stake is the future not only of the generation scarred by the pandemic, but of all the pupils who will come after them
or were likely to spread the virus to older people, school closures were a prudent precaution. But in many places they continued long after it became clear that the risks of reopening classrooms were relatively small. During the first two years of the pandemic more than 80% of schooldays in Latin America and South Asia were disrupted by closures of some sort. Even today schools in some countries, such as the Philippines, remain shut to most pupils, leaving their minds to atrophy.
Globally, the harm that school closures have done to children has vastly outweighed any benefits they may have had for public health. The World Bank says the share of ten-year-olds in middle- and low-income countries who cannot read and understand a simple story has risen from 57% in 2019 to roughly 70%. If they lack such elementary skills, they will struggle to earn a good living.
Politicians talk endlessly about the importance of schooling, but words are cheap and a fit-for-purpose education system is not. Spending has risen modestly in recent decades but fell in many countries during the pandemic. Scandalously, many governments spend more on rich pupils than they do on poor ones. Moreover, too little development aid goes to education, and some is self-interested.
Many of the most critical changes are not things that money will buy. Testing is a mess, leading governments to overestimate levels of literacy. New teachers have been hired but not trained properly. Lessons in reading and maths are too often cut short to make room for instruction in whatever other subjects happen to be faddish, from the moral certainties of left-leaning Westerners to the thoughts of Xi Jinping.
At present a quarter of countries do not have any plans to help children claw back learning lost during the pandemic, according to a survey carried out earlier this year by. Another quarter have inadequate catch-up strategies. The same energy that was once poured into building schools and filling up classrooms should now be used to improve the lessons that take place within them.
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