International | Wasted minds

Covid learning loss has been a global disaster

Millions of children are still out of school. The costs are stacking up

MALOLOS, PHILIPPINES - OCTOBER 13: Rem Dela Pena answers learning materials at a sundries store while her mother looks on, as schools remain closed on October 13, 2021 in the coastal village of Pamarawan in Malolos, Bulacan province, Philippines. As students all over the world are returning to schools, millions of children in the Philippines are staying at home for the second year in a row because of the pandemic, sparking fears of a deepening education crisis in a country where many lack access to computers or the internet. By the end of October, the Philippines will remain the only country in the world that has yet to resume face-to-face classes, after Venezuela announced that it will move to reopen schools on October 25. Education experts in the country have expressed concerns that the pandemic is putting a strain on the well-being and mental health of students struggling to learn under distance learning and isolation, as well as parents who are forced to serve as surrogate teachers for subjects they themselves may not have studied when they were in school. A recent survey conducted by multisectoral group Movement for Safe, Equitable, Quality and Relevant Education (SEQuRE) found that most students said they "learned less" under remote learning compared with the traditional face-to-face setup. The country's education ministry has yet to set a date for the resumption of physical classes after President Duterte recently approved the partial reopening of schools where the risk of COVID-19 is low. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
|Manila, Mumbai and Tuxtla

King norvic tarroyo lives with his parents and five siblings in a slum near the sea wall in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The eight-year-old has not set foot in a school since March 2020, when classrooms closed as a precaution against covid-19. Twenty-seven months later his school, like thousands of others across the country, remains shut. A year ago teachers gave him a tablet computer for remote learning. But his mother says he uses it for only a few hours each day. After that, he pretends to snooze or scampers into alleys near his home. His mum sometimes does his schoolwork for him.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “Millions of wasted minds”

Who’s afraid of TikTok?

From the July 9th 2022 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition
Reuse this content

More from International

Paris could change how cities host the Olympics for good

The games will test the success of new solutions to old bugbears

Could America fight its enemies without breaking the law?

The speed and intensity of prospective conflicts could test the laws of war

How China and Russia could hobble the internet

The undersea cables that connect the world are becoming military targets

Trump and other populists will haunt NATO’s 75th birthday party

Threats to Western alliances lie both within and without the club

The rise of the truly cruel summer

Deadly heat is increasingly the norm, not an exception to it

Brainy Indians are piling into Western universities

Will rich countries welcome them the way they did Chinese students?