It is precisely about these serious educational deficiencies that, at the beginning of , we are experiencing the onslaught of the pandemic . During the first quarter, in-person classes were suspended and education came to a virtual standstill throughout the world. This forced closure not only caught educational systems off guard, but placed on them a demand that seemed almost impossible: to keep education alive while schools were closed, implementing various distance learning modalities for which they had never really prepared. Thus, educational systems reacted in different ways. The authorities reacted. The educational centers and their teachers reacted.
The students and their families also reacted
With many variations between countries, various distance education tools were used, from the use of incipient educational platforms, to simpler tools such as WhatsApp and even photocopies, the distribution of materials and telephone calls. This presented an additional challenge: unequal access to connectivity, equipment and educational materials. It also highlighted the unequal conditions in which students live and can study at home, as well as the support they can receive from their families. For this reason, and despite all efforts, the pandemic has caused a great educational loss . Many of the knowledge that the students should have acquired during the and school years were simply not achieved or were achieved in a very partial and unequal way. This has been true all over the world.
According to an OECD study , there were already
Indications from various countries in that many students had very little effective instruction. For a high percentage of students, learning seems to have been almost non-existent . For example, the report cites early tracking from an online mathematics teaching app in several school districts in the United States, which suggests that learning suffered a sharp decline during the crisis, especially in schools in low-income areas. . In that same sense, evidence in Germany shows that the time that children dedicated to school activities was reduced by half with the pandemic, with % of students devoting no more than two hours a day to studying and % devoting less than four hours. Meanwhile, time spent on entertainment – watching television or playing with computers or cell phones – increased to more than five hours a day.
