EDITORIAL - Learners left behind

As world leaders including President Marcos gather this week for the annual United Nations General Assembly, those going through the visitors’ entrance at the UN headquarters in New York are greeted by an installation called a “Learning Crisis Classroom.”

The exhibit seeks to call global attention to the learning crisis that has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A third of the desks in the classroom installation are the regular ones made of wood, with a backpack of the United Nations Children’s Fund on the chair beside the desk. This represents the one-third of 10-year-old children worldwide with minimum proficiency in reading comprehension – those who can read and understand a simple written story.

Two-thirds of the desks, however, are made of transparent material and are nearly invisible, representing the 64 percent of children worldwide, as estimated by the UNICEF, lacking that minimum proficiency. Before the pandemic, the figure was only about 50 percent.

The numbers are worse in the Philippines, where in-person learning partially resumed beginning last month after two years of mostly remote learning. In November last year, the World Bank estimated that learning poverty in the Philippines, which stood at 69.5 percent in 2019 before COVID struck, had worsened to a high 90 percent by August 2021. UNICEF, in a joint report with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, placed learning poverty at 85 percent in the Philippines as of February this year. Among the 122 countries covered by the report, the Philippines had the longest period of closure of in-person classes.

Philippine officials, aware that the typical Filipino household is large with members from several generations living together usually in cramped spaces, had opted for prolonged hybrid learning throughout the pandemic to protect children and vulnerable members of their households from COVID infection. But the cramped environment was also not conducive to proper learning. Combined with poor internet connection and other challenges posed by remote learning, the objective of ensuring that no child would be left behind amid the COVID lockdowns was not quite achieved.

While the need to protect children and their households from COVID infection has been acknowledged by child welfare advocates and education experts, they have also noted that many schools lacked the needed equipment, connectivity and educators’ skills sets to make distance learning work. Alongside the UN General Assembly, the Transforming Education Summit is being held in New York. The UNICEF is urging governments to invest in remedial and catch-up learning under a safe and supportive environment and to provide teachers the necessary equipment and upskilling for their tasks.

“Under-resourced schools, underpaid and underqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms and archaic curricula are undermining our children’s ability to reach their full potential,” UNICEF executive director Catherine Russel said, as she stressed the need to reverse the current trend. “Low levels of learning today mean less opportunity tomorrow.”