Corona threatens all people equally. Alpha, Delta, Omicron – no continent is spared from the virus. That is right and yet wrong. Corona is a particular threat to the health of the elderly. In the case of boys, on the other hand, future opportunities and life in general are threatened.
In the past two years, 1.5 billion students have not been able to learn, study and live as they normally would. I take this number from this overview by UNESCO. To this day, the nations of the world are at odds over the issue of school closures. While schools in the USA were completely or partially closed for 71 weeks, in many cases they are still so today, France or Spain only closed the classrooms for 12 or 15 weeks, and Switzerland only for six weeks. At 38 weeks, Germany is somewhere in the middle. Uganda reopened schools last week after 83 weeks of school closures: In the meantime, students and teachers have had to find work elsewhere, probably under worse conditions for protection against infection than in the classroom.
The social consensus has turned. Schools were closed two years ago. Now it’s time to close the schools last. Only education unions and teachers’ associations are still flirting with partial school closures. Presumably they see themselves as advocates for the teachers rather than the students. One should examine whether there is a correlation between the duration of school closures and student health, or rather the strength of unions in each country. In any case, my colleague Winand von Petersdorff, USA business correspondent for the FAZ, reports that the teachers’ union is the last powerful workers’ organization there.
Children spent less time studying
The realization is slowly catching on that in schools, too, decisions must be made according to criteria of proportionality. Complete school closures for health reasons have ignored the educational, psychological, social, and economic costs of homeschooling. Only when we realized that students suffer less from the virus than from a lack of learning, a lack of contacts and a lack of variety did the weighting shift.
Is everything good now? Karin Prien, CDU Minister of Education from Schleswig-Holstein, recently claimed something like this. At first they were “caught cold”, but then they upgraded digitally, educationally and hygienically (keyword “air filter”) in order to react “appropriately to the situation”, Prien recently said in a talk show; she is President of the Conference of Ministers of Education.
Read F+ now for free for 30 days and get access to all articles on FAZ.NET.
READ F+ NOW
Is she right? Ludger Wößmann, education economist at the Munich Ifo Institute, has doubts. Wößmann compared the second wave of school closures in 2021 with the first lockdown in 2020. He asked 2,000 parents how children spent the several weeks of school closures. The result: On average, children spent 4.3 hours a day in school in spring 2021. Although that is almost three quarters of an hour more than in the previous year, it is still three hours less than before the crisis. Almost every fourth child has not spent more than two hours a day with school. The children spend more time watching television, computer games and on their smartphones (4.6 hours) than learning.
.