School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic caused extreme learning losses, World Bank President Ajay Banga said on July 19, underlining the need to devise a mechanism to prevent such situations before the next pandemic hits.
"We have a real challenge for the generation which was undergoing schooling during the pandemic," Banga said, responding to a question by PTI.
"Developed and developing countries were learning how to deal with it when we were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been extreme learning losses due to prolonged school closures during the period…and dealing with the learning losses is not just India's problem, it is an issue across the globe," he said.
"My view is that we must learn now. We have to fix what we have got, pretty much make sure we learn before the next pandemic, devise a mechanism…or we will make the same mistakes again. The next one (pandemic) will come fore sure. It is a question of how long before it does come? To me that is the bigger issue," he added.
The World Bank had previously noted the prolonged closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic in India may cause a loss of over $400 billion in the country's future earnings, besides substantial learning losses.
Indian-American Banga, 63, took over as the president of the World Bank last month, becoming the first person of colour to head either of the two global financial institutions — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Banga is on his first visit to India after taking over the charge of the global lender. He will attend the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting in Ahmedabad.
Earlier in the day, he visited the GMR Varalakshmi Centre for Empowerment and Livelihoods, a skill centre in Dwarka, and interacted with students.
According to World Bank estimates, pandemic-related school closures disrupted education for over 1.6 billion children in 188 countries. Globally, from February 2020 until February 2022, education systems were on an average fully closed for in-person schooling about 141 instructional days, with the world's poorest children disproportionately affected.
"Rigorous empirical evidence from various countries, including low, middle and high-income contexts across regions, reveals very steep losses. Each month of school closures led to a full month of lost learning, reflecting the limited effectiveness of remote learning. In some cases, outcomes were even worse," a World Bank report had noted.
The report had warned that since learning is cumulative, the learning losses of the two years, if not addressed quickly, will likely compound over time especially when the losses were in foundational skills, including basic literacy and numeracy.
"Governments, therefore, need to act decisively now. Yet many education systems are bringing students back to advanced curricula that they are not ready for, ignoring the learning losses.
"A student who was in class 2 in 2020 and then experienced two years of school closures is now expected to handle a Class 4 curriculum in 2022. There is a great risk that students will understand little, become disengaged, and keep falling further and further behind, until they drop out,"it had added. PTI GJS GJS TIR TIR
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