School’s still out for Indian children

After a year of limited social interaction, I was surprised last week to receive an invitation from a five-star hotel to a reception celebrating the refurbishment of its members-only business club. I also found myself invited to a 70th birthday party and an in-person book launch.

Meanwhile, the stadium near my home held a massive handicrafts fair, bringing together 600 artisans from across India to show their wares. If traffic was any indication, the 10-day event was well attended.

Indians are making a determined bid to return to their pre-pandemic exuberance after a decline in Covid-19 infections and the launch of a nationwide vaccination drive. People are gathering for weddings, parties, religious processions, protests and political rallies.

But missing out on the return to normal are most of India’s estimated 247m school children. Many have yet to set foot in a classroom, as politicians balk at reopening schools, especially for the littlest learners. Though some states have taken back older students, especially those preparing for competitive national exams, most of India’s primary school-age children have not had systematic, in-person teaching for a full year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government doesn’t seem too concerned. Prakash Javadekar, the minister of information, declared in parliament last month that not one Indian child has been deprived of education during the pandemic, thanks to online lessons. The Modi government has not designated teachers as “frontline workers” for priority access to Covid-19 vaccines either, though that could help with safe school reopening.

But many educators and parents are frustrated with virtual learning. Our nanny’s two primary school-aged grandchildren have tried to attend online lessons, sharing a single mobile phone. They spent so much time squinting into the phone — and got so little out of it — their mother decided to pay an older girl to tutor them. These children were lucky to have connectivity, as Unicef estimates that just a quarter of Indian households had internet access before the pandemic.

Anurag Behar, CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation — a philanthropic education organisation, says that the core problem with virtual lessons is not merely the lack of devices or connectivity, but that it doesn’t work in building foundational skills in young learners. “Leave aside social and emotional, even cognitive capacities cannot be developed in children through online education,” Behar says. “It’s not effective.”

Some Indian states have sent teachers into communities to interact informally with kids a couple hours a day, but Behar says this is no substitute for structured classroom teaching. Not only have India’s primary school children failed to progress, but most have actually regressed. A recent study of more than 16,000 government school students in five states found 92 per cent had lost at least one key language skill, and 82 per cent had lost at least one maths skill.

Ironically, many children are playing together in their villages and urban slums, raising further questions about closed classrooms. “We should have opened up schools months ago,” says Behar. “Children are anyhow intermingling, so the risk of the spread of infection would not have increased even by a small fraction.”

Abhijit Banerjee, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, warns that many Indian children may never return to school, especially those that took jobs to help families, condemning them to a lifetime of lower earnings. “Once you enter the labour market, it’s very hard to come back,” he says.

For those returning to the classroom, the long-term consequences of the last year will depend on whether educators acknowledge the extent of lost capacities — and make realistic plans to help students regain them. 

“If we just behave as though this never happened and promote kids from one grade to another, it will be a huge problem,” says Behar.

Banerjee agrees. “We’ve basically lost a year,” he says. “We need to be very mindful of this, accept there has been a lot of learning loss and focus on repairing that damage. I don’t think we should assume it’s going to sort itself out.”

amy.kazmin@ft.com