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International
The Economist July 9th 2022
Education
Millions of wasted minds
MANILA , MUMBAI AND TUXTLA
Covid learning loss has been a global disaster. The costs are stacking up
K
ing norvic tarroyo lives with his par ents and fi ve siblings in a slum near the sea wall in Manila, the capital of the Philip pines. The eightyearold has not set foot in a school since March 2020, when class rooms closed as a precaution against co vid19. Twentyseven 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. The Philippines’ response to covid19 has been terrible for its children. For the fi rst seven months of the pandemic the country’s 27m pupils received no classes of any kind. For more than a year children in much of the Philippines were not even supposed to leave their homes. Since the start of 2022 about 80% of government schools have been granted permission to
restart some limited facetoface lessons. But not all of them have chosen to do so. Perhaps twothirds of children have not yet been invited back to school at all. When covid19 fi rst began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in class rooms; how sick youngsters would be come; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to edu cation lasted long after encouraging ans wers to these questions emerged. New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected. Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten yearolds in low and middleincome coun tries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That fi gure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten yearolds who cannot read in Latin Ameri ca, probably the worstaff ected region,
could rocket from around 50% to 80% (see chart 1 on next page). Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less. McKinsey, a consultancy, estim ates that by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been— an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today. That is much more than the $10trn it had estimated in 2020, and also an increase on the $17trn it was predicting last year. In many parts of the world, schools were closed for far too long (see chart 2 on next page). During the fi rst two years of the pandemic countries enforced national school closures lasting 20 weeks on aver age, according to unesco. Periods of “par tial” closure—when schools were closed in some parts of a country, or to some year groups, or were running parttime sched ules—wasted a further 21 weeks. Regional diff erences are huge. Full and partial shut downs lasted 29 weeks in Europe and 32 weeks in subSaharan Africa. Countries in Latin America imposed restrictions lasting 63 weeks, on average. That fi gure was 73 weeks in South Asia. Over two years nearly 153m children missed more than half of all inperson schooling, reckons unesco. More than
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