The results are in. In the name of protecting us from a virus which kills mainly people past the median life expectancy, we have allowed devastating harm to be inflicted on an entire generation of children.
A new report from UNESCO confirms all this in spades – not just for American children, but for children all around the globe. School closures and the substitution of digital learning for human-to-human contact left most children behind, and supercharged inequalities.
The scope and scale of this worldwide assault on children is jaw-dropping. At the peak of school closures, in April of 2020, formal learning was interrupted or severely curtailed for ninety percent of kids. One year later, in March of 2021, half of the world’s learners still were affected. Full or partial closures continued in some communities until late 2022, or even into 2023 in a few cases.
Students’ academic progress was greatly retarded compared to what they would have achieved had schools remained open. In nations where children normally complete only a few years of formal schooling, this translates to a loss of a sixth or more of their lifetime education. The World Bank estimated the decision to treat kids as biohazards would cost these children some seventeen TRILLION dollars in lifetime earnings – a figure later revised upwards to twenty-one trillion.
The pernicious effects of school closures were not distributed evenly. Predictably, these impacts fell hardest on the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and girls. The decision to replace brick-and-mortar schools with online learning effectively put schooling out of reach for half a BILLION children whose families lacked access to laptop computers, tablets, and even cell phones, not to mention internet access. The gap between the haves and the have-nots was widened by soaring demand and dwindling supply, aggravated by pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions. Even in the richest country in the world, students were reduced to cruising the streets at night looking for an unlocked WI-FI portal, or loitering in the parking lots of fast-food restaurants, in order to gain access.
In low-income nations, the picture was even more bleak. The report provides poignant examples. A father in Cameroon wondered how his children were supposed to access the internet when they experienced power outages seven days a week. A mother in Pakistan had to choose between paying for internet or for food for her children. A teenage girl in Congo reported that her peers were prostituting themselves for phone credits.
Even when kids were able to access the internet, the connection was often slow, intermittent, and/or pixelated. Many of them lacked basic learning tools such as pencils or paper. Many lacked a dedicated learning space, and had to attend online meetings in shared spaces serving multiple functions – washing, cooking, eating, working, entertaining, and caring for small children or older people. What had formerly been people’s private lives now were wide open to scrutiny from prying eyes. Often, classes for multiple grades were conducted at the same time, forcing parents to choose between buying a computer for each child (not even an option in most cases) or restricting schooling privileges to a single child.
Many families gave up entirely. Children unable to attend school virtually were diverted to unpaid domestic labor, or child marriage, or working in mines or scavenging in e-waste dumps for the rare metals needed to manufacture computers. Many more ended doing nothing in particular – or NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), in the lingo of the sociologists. Probably most of these children will never return to school.
Even for the affluent classes in living developed nations, the promise of re-shaping learning for the digital age, replacing outmoded ideas and stultifying paradigms with a bright new world of self-organized and self-motivated learning, turned out to be not all it had been cracked up to be. Parents reported spending inordinate amounts of time rebooting problematic devices, re-entering WI-FI passcodes, re-starting routers, and otherwise trying to troubleshoot technical problems. For children, all too often online schooling turned out to be less a journey of discovery and exploration and more a dreary routine of traversing file-sharing systems, slogging through automated learning content, checking for updates, and sitting through seemingly endless video meetings.
The result of all this has been a staggering loss of learning. Reading skills of nine-year-olds in the United States showed the greatest drop in three decades, while their math skills underwent the biggest drop ever. The World Bank predicted that the number of children in low- and middle-income countries living in “learning poverty” – i.e., unable to read a simple text by the age of ten – will rise from the current level of fifty-five percent to seventy percent. A study of UNESCO data concluded that, globally, students were eight months behind where they would have been absent the pandemic – an entire year’s worth of learning lost. Tomorrow’s adults will be less adept at critical thinking, reasoned debate, and functioning as informed citizens.
But the damage doesn’t end there. School is not simply a place where children go to have their brains filled with knowledge, in the manner of topping off a gas tank. Sports, art, music, drama, socializing – opportunities for all of these things were severely curtailed, even in the developed world. Instead, many kids filled their waking hours with television programs, video games, and scrolling through social media. Rates of obesity, type II diabetes, and myopia rose. Other children, cut off from the school breakfasts and lunches that for some were their only nutritious meals in a day, suffered from hunger and malnutrition.
Reports of child abuse declined during the pandemic – but there is absolutely no reason that actual child abuse did. Child abuse is often detected and reported by teachers, and obviously the opportunity to do so disappeared when schools closed.
Less exercise, more screen time, social isolation, and (in some cases) home confinement with abusive caretakers – all this was a recipe for a mental health crisis in kids. In the United States, nearly half of upper secondary students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by teen girls soared.
In fairness, it should be pointed out that not everyone fared so badly. In less than a year, the user base for Google Classroom grew from forty million to over 150 million. The market valuation for Coursera more than doubled, from three billion dollars to seven billion.
Was it worth it? The answer to that question is a big fat No. Healthy children are at virtually zero risk for death or serious complications due to covid. School closures had minimal effect on the course of the pandemic, and why would anybody have thought otherwise? Trying to stop the spread of an airborne virus with multiple animal reservoirs by lockdowns and school closures is a task akin to trying to bail the ocean. In the absence of an effective vaccine (and we don’t have an effective vaccine), the only solution to the pandemic is herd immunity.
So why was this done? In the words of noted philosopher and humanitarian Anthony Fauci:
You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated.
Indeed. And the pernicious effects of all this will be reverberating for decades. An entire generation of children will lead diminished lives, with fewer opportunities, and die sooner. And now the legacy media is telling us to just move on. Are we going to let them get away with this?
Patrick D Hahn is a lecturer, researcher, and author of four books, including The Day the Science Died: Covid Vaccines and the Power of Fear.
Okay Patrick, what do we do about it? We are aware of the problem. I have yet to learn of any possible solution. Please keep me posted