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IEconomic lockdowns hurt production, but once they are lifted, activity usually bounces back, and jobs are back. In comparison, the lockdown in schools can have a longer and more harmful effect.
A new survey of nearly 1,400 underprivileged school children from 15 Indian states raises some troubling prospects. For example, in a year and a half of pandemic-related school closures, a four-year learning deficit has arisen. A student who was in Grade 3 before COVID-19 is now in Grade 5, and will soon be entering middle school, but with the reading ability of a Grade 1 student.
Attempting to bridge this gap would place huge demands on a reluctant welfare state, while without a solution it would be taken away from India’s “demographic dividend” – the high growth that the country could potentially achieve, while it still Enjoys a relatively young population.
The School Children’s Online and Offline Learning, or Schools, survey, overseen by a group of economists including Jean Dreze and Ritika Khera, shines a spotlight on the biggest losers of the lockdown: the poor. At the household level, there is much greater penetration of smartphones: 77 percent in urban areas and 51 percent in villages, exactly what is expected in a country that will see a kind of digital revolution amid crashing handset and data prices. Yet, even in households with Internet-enabled devices, the proportion of children who regularly study online drops to 31% in cities and 15% in villages. The phone wager’s claim clearly outweighs its usefulness as an educational tool.
“The school has been closed since the pandemic began.” That sentence was, in large typeface, with volunteer surveyors asking children to read in their local language. About 35% of students in grades 3–5 in cities and 42% of groups in villages could not manage more than a few papers.
From Wall Street, the approach to technology-assisted learning in India looks very different. As China cracks down on private education, interest in India is rising, with an estimated $4 billion inflow into the industry over the past 18 months. Byju’s, a startup valued at $16.5 billion, is in early discussions about an initial public offering. Smaller rivals like Eruditus and UpGrad raised money from investors last month.
But the thriving edtech market mostly caters to the needs of the wealthy section of the population. Those who make a precarious living from non-salaried occupations – and are far from the top of Indian society’s caste hierarchy – can do little to change findings that show that generally better-equipped urban schools Far from it, only 12% of children who have some access to online education attend live lessons.
For those sent to the offline world, the biggest learning comes from teacher-assigned homework, which covers only 39% of students, even in cities. Without regular feedback the pedagogical significance of homework is questionable, but that’s another thing. Even before the pandemic, the delivery of education was one-sided, but has become more so due to a yawning digital divide.
Some Indian states are beginning to believe that physical classes for primary and middle-school students should resume without delay. Otherwise, it may be impossible to reverse the learning gap, leading to high dropout rates and concomitant social problems including youth violence. Future productivity may suffer, and income inequality may worsen as a generation is robbed of a shot at upward mobility. Society must place at least some weight on the future of today’s underprivileged children, even as it deals with an immediate public health challenge.
The good news is that India’s poor have not given up on education. The school survey states that child labor is uncommon among very young children, although among girls aged 10 to 14, the “large majority” are now doing some housework and in villages, 8% of them have done so in the past three months. Worked in payment. .
Schools must reopen before more families are tempted to bargain their future for food. –bloomberg
read also: 37% of students in rural areas are not studying at all because schools are closed, finds survey
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