The class divide that threatens to thwart our educational goals

Relevance: Understand the learning loss due to Pandemic

Synopsis: The article highlights the “learning loss” that occurred due to school closure during the pandemic. India has to work hard to ensure that learning loss does not translate to a loss in future.

Introduction

The lockdowns because of the Pandemic impacted the learning, especially for the children. There is no systematic effort to recover that lost learning. Moreover, online education is found to be inadequate for children, because of the nature of education.

What is learning loss?

Learning loss is the product of two factors:

• What should have been taught and learned in the past 17 months
• What children knew in Mar 2020 but have forgotten because of extended school break.

The class divide has also impacted the learning outcomes:

• Middle/upper-class people have better access to digital tools augmented by personal tutoring & other learning resources. Moreover, students have the support of their families too, so learning loss is less.
  • India’s top 10% have not been impacted by this crisis
• But the learning loss impacted the future of almost 210-220 Million children.

Issues with government initiatives:

• Although some states took steps to address the learning loss, they did not seen adequately cover this problem.
• The main reason behind that is inflexibility and poor coordination of our education system

Way forward

A lost year means a lost future. So, India must quickly start out schools and work towards bridging the gap of learning by focusing on recovering the lost learning.