Must try harder Closing the world’s schools caused children great harm
C OVID-19 RARELY makes children very ill. In the year to April the chance of an American aged 5-14 catching and dying from the virus was about one in 500,000—roughly a tenth of a child’s chance of dying in a traffic accident in normal times. Yet schools around the world have been wholly or partly closed for about two-thirds of an academic year because of the pandemic.
The immense harm this has done to children’s prospects might be justified if closing classrooms were one of the best ways of preventing lethal infections among adults. But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. Many have kept schools shut even as bars and restaurants open, either to appease teachers’ unions, whose members get paid whether they teach in person or not, or to placate nervous parents.
As a result, young brains are being starved of stimulation. Primary-school pupils in England are around three months behind where they normally would be; children in Ethiopia learned 60-70% less than usual during 2020. Even before the pandemic things were bad. More than half of ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries could not read a simple paragraph. The World Bank warns this could rise to almost two-thirds. In all countries school closures will widen the gap between better-off pupils (who have iPads and quiet bedrooms for remote learning) and worse-off ones (who often don’t).
