We could make up for the covid disruption of schooling if we try

First was a loss of learning. While it should have been obvious that shut schools meant children will not learn what they must as part of their curricular education, it took a while for the extent of the problem to be realized. And it took even more time for a widespread understanding that children were also forgetting what they had learnt earlier. Over a period of time, many studies underlined the depth and breadth of this problem.

Second, efforts to compensate for shut schools were inadequate. While responses varied from state to state, on an average these efforts could not help most students. It also became clear that online education is ineffective for school children. This is not only a matter of access to devices and the internet, but inherent to the nature of learning at this age. In short, by January 2022, there was a staggering loss of learning across grades all over the country.

Third, schools play significant roles in addition to being educational institutions. Society has become so habituated to schools that we just take them for granted. Only with a complete systemic shutdown did we realize that schools not only have a central role in education, but also play a key role in the socialization and care of children.

Now that two years have passed since schools resumed normal operations, where are we and what have we learnt?

First, the recovery of lost learning and getting children back to the levels where they should be has been very patchy across the country. It varies both across and within states, and even from school to school. Some states did take this matter very seriously and made systematic attempts to address it, but most others either had a haphazard approach or quickly declared victory and moved on. We are now in a situation where the average learning levels of children are lower than what they were before the pandemic. The consequences of this are very significant. To take the most basic of matters, in any grade today, a much larger proportion of children cannot do basic mathematics and have not gained foundational literacy. Even pre-pandemic, a large number of children were not attaining these basic capacities, as our education system was failing them. But this has been exacerbated significantly by the shutdown. The matter is compounded by the lack of a sound understanding of the extent of these failures and their distribution.

Second, unsurprisingly, this educational setback differs across socio-economic categories. The vulnerable and disadvantaged have lost a lot more than those who had the social and economic resources to compensate for the school shutdown. This new source of disparity widens societal cleavages with serious consequences, many of which will be clear over the next decade or two. An entire generation may have lost education, never to fully recover.

Third, recovering lost learning is possible. Schools have succeeded in this by making dedicated and systematic efforts. We work directly with schools and teachers who educate about 6.5 million children and indirectly with about 15 million more—and we can see clear cases of success.

Schools that have taken it upon themselves to ensure that they continually assess their students’ learning precisely and then teach them the appropriate syllabus with relevant and effective pedagogy, without bothering about which grade they are in currently, have been the most successful. This requires hard work, because, for example, in the same grade 6, you may have students who can’t do basic mathematics or just cannot write or read; while in that very class, you may have students who are proficient with the grade 5 syllabus. So, teachers must teach these groups different things in different ways.

While tackling such complexity is the responsibility of the school and its teachers, it is equally the responsibility of the state education system to enable them to do so. In many states, educational administrators delude themselves that the learning-loss problem has been solved and force an unrealistic resumption of current-grade syllabi for all students.

In one of the remotest parts of India, I sat with grade 4 students and was amazed by their math and language abilities. They were fluent in constructing and solving real-life problems using arithmetic. In the same school, I found grade 5 students with weaker mathematical abilities than grade 4 students. This puzzle was explained by their dedicated teacher: the grade 5 kids bore the full brunt of the school shutdown, while grade 4 kids escaped much of it. Therefore, it was taking enormously more effort to get grade 5 kids up to speed.

Having seen such examples all over the country, I think we have it in us to ensure we don’t have an educationally lost generation. But we must try very hard, much harder than what we are doing, and not delude ourselves that this huge problem has been solved.