By Stefania Giannini and Leonardo Garnier
30 Jun 2022
The Covid-19 pandemic´s impact on education has been dramatic all over the world; but the truth is that the situation was already critical before the pandemic, both in terms of access and in terms of learning.
Before the pandemic, 285 million children were not attending school; and about half of those who did attend school in developing countries were unable to read a basic sentence by 10 years of age.
Many were entering a precarious labour market lacking the knowledge, skills or values needed to thrive in a rapidly changing world. These deficits were often felt most by girls and by marginalised groups such as those living in poverty, persons with disabilities, those located in rural areas or international migrants.
On top of this came the pandemic and, since then, the situation became dramatically worse. Students have lost out on important learning and regressed on previous learning; many risk never returning to school; and informality, inactivity and job insecurity have all increased. It is a crisis over a crisis.
That is why the Transforming Education Summit took place in Paris this week. We must turn the tide on this crisis. In terms of education, it would not be enough merely to recover from the pandemic and then return to where we were in 2019. We must be more ambitious. We must make sure that we don’t just go back, but that we go “back to the future”.
The goal of the summit was to galvanise the social and political commitment to promote such transformation so that we can really guarantee a quality education for every boy and girl on this planet, as we had agreed in the Sustainable Development Goal on education (SDG4). This is their right: to receive the kind of education that would allow them to become the persons they want to be and to contribute as active agents of their own future. That is the role of education.
