18 ms·

Covid learning loss has been a global disaster

62 points by fortran77 4y ago

hunglee2 4y ago
add this to the possibly permanent degradation of cognitive function, and we may be witnessing an unprecedented species wide debilitation. I wonder how much this might actually slow us down, imagine an Einstein who never got beyond the clerks job because brain fog stopped his discoveries
- Fronzie 4y ago
  Leaded gasoline has been a former experiment in population-wide reduction of intelligence and increase of aggressiveness. Supposedly that affected that 80's, but I am not aware of systematic studies on that.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Lots of links starting from here: https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-tragedy-how-the-car-and-gas-industry-knew-about-the-health-risks-of-leaded-fuel-but-sold-it-for-100-years-anyway-173395 https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-tragedy-how-the-car...
    - asah 4y ago
      thx! TIL leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s primarily because it clogged catalytic converters needed to end smog, not because of health reasons! (smog used to be terrible - I lived through the latter half of that period, am I can't even relate to how awful it used to be... friends and I remember walking in midtown Manhattan, blowing our noses and it being black... I can't even imagine pre-1980 let alone pre-1970... https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d )
      - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
        > leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s ... In automobiles. Lead is very much in use for aircraft fuel, just google AVGAS.
        andrepd 4y ago
        It's absolutely bonkers to me that recreational fliers can still rain toxic lead on people below.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    And yet the US didn’t seem to crash and burn? HN is preoccupied with intelligence to the point of hysteria.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      I enjoyed seeing your other comment[s] in this mess of a thread. Good luck!
- vnorilo 4y ago
  that a present-day Von Neumann is probably somewhere working on ad/fintech is in many ways even more depressing.
  - jleyank 4y ago
    Yup. Todays best and brightest for the most part are working hard to sell ads and track users of smartphones.
  - hunglee2 4y ago
    certainly, market system misallocates a ton of resources. We need to recalibrate high value + high status
achow 4y ago
Butterfly Effect is not accounted for (how many innovation we would lose are not quantifiable). Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less... by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
headsoup 4y ago
I think there is something wrong with an attitude that children not in school are apparently unable to learn and develop. And something even more horribly wrong if that is true.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  The "in school" part is important here. Children don't have to be in a classroom, but they do need a good teacher, proper resources, etc. for them to learn. Many weren't even getting these basics pre-covid, so when it did hit, they were completely lost.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    My wife teaches kindergarten. We have small children. They absolutely need to be in person at that age. Her School stopped virtual learning early because it just wasn’t working. We all got Covid because of it. It sucked but was better for kids.
- AzzieElbab 4y ago
  You are projecting. For many families that is indeed the case. There is no one at home to provide either education or motivation for many different reasons
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  Why? We're social beings and it is extremely important for children to be with other children, especially in a setting where not all of them are best friends with each other or family. How else would they learn social skills? You seem to assume that it would be good if school was dispensable, but why would you think that?
  - vitno 4y ago
    Why would you assume the ideal environment for learning social skills is in a school with children interacting primarily with other poorly developed children? Life experience and growth shouldn't be confined to a standard classroom.
kalaido 4y ago
Wondering how many people who are commenting here, actually have children themselves. Because how I see it (as a parent) school closures itself are only the tip of the iceberg...the schools which reopened with harsh mask, social distancing and constant disinfect your hands rules etc..are at least equally as bad for the development of a child
- Markoff 4y ago
  it's easy to see, anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school, but there are also enlightened childless people who understand how wrong is it even without having children
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - imustbeevil 4y ago
    > anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school Or like, not seeing everything as black and white. We had to do something because the hospitals were overflowing. When all the hospital beds are full of old covid patients slowly dying, every other person who gets injured is receiving treatment on the floor in the hallway, or not at all. You can have all the nuanced discussion you want about the degree of which any of the controls were implemented, but your position cannot be that we should have done nothing. What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up.
    - Markoff 4y ago
      > What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up. ROFL Yeah, that worked so great for China or for everyone since we had flu. Closing schools had no impact on virus, not saving hospitals from overflowing. Hospitals were not overflowing with school kids or their parents.
willcipriano 4y ago
Even after all this the schools around me have the stones to tell parents that they can't take their kids on vacation for a week during the school year because they might miss something and fall behind.
- heurisko 4y ago
  If you have (in the UK) 30 children being taken out of school at various time for holidays, the it turns into a nightmare of catching up.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    So? They pass the relevant tests, they move up. They fail, they get held back. Surely there is a middle ground between kid missing half the school year and a week of vacation.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      It isn't the intact families that make effort to spend time together that struggle in school frankly. My friends kids are straight A students they still make threats that they are going to take him to court.
    - heurisko 4y ago
      No, it's the expectation on the teacher to provide material for 30 children to catch up, for a week each. It's a nightmare for the teacher, who then has less time left for the children who didn't go on holiday to progress.
- BrianOnHN 4y ago
  Sounds like you would be the perfect candidate for virtual schooling. Leave the in-person schooling for kids and parents that really have no other option. Remember, for some kids school is the only safe place where they can also get a decent meal. I think it's best if our underfunded teachers focus on those kids instead of working extra to enable your vacation lifestyle.
bananapear 4y ago
The sad thing is that none of this was inevitable. A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. We'll be counting the costs of this hysteria for decades to come, when the lives of those "saved" are long over.
- mercy_dude 4y ago
- BrianOnHN 4y ago
  > A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. Also why medicare is the US makes no sense to me.
  - refurb 4y ago
    That’s seems extreme. Nothing wrong with providing medical care to the elderly.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Something wrong with medical care for 80+ year olds being a political priority and ensuring every child gets a nutritious lunch at school not being a political priority. My grandpa got taxpayer funded dialysis at 95+ while I was offered defrosted cardboard pizza for lunch everyday, and would have had to pay for it.
      - Nullabillity 4y ago
        You can do both, it's not an either/or.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
jl6 4y ago
Data point: my kids are doing fine. They hated lockdown, but who didn’t? They aren’t behind in either academic or social terms. However, they had parents who supported them throughout with home learning, extracurricular learning, love and encouragement, and a network of friends and families in similar conditions who worked together to keep up virtual contact and socialisation. What I worry about are the kids who didn’t have this kind of support. We had the resources to compensate for lockdown. A lot of families didn’t In the final evaluation, I expect this will result in a deepening rich-poor divide. This is somewhat ironic considering it was predominantly leftward politicians advocating for more/deeper lockdowns that disproportionately harm the poor, and rightward politicians advocating for relaxing lockdowns and sacrificing the elderly.
- andrepd 4y ago
  You don't even need to expect: that is exactly, spot-on what happened. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/784041/ado2022-learning-losses.pdf https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/784041/a...
orwin 4y ago
Not really, the real disaster is the lack of stimulation. I mean, unless for high-school students, everything that you learn will be re-taught eventually. I missed half a year (well, 5 month) and didn't go over divisions, still the next year was fraction and honestly, i wasn't less prepared than my friends. I won't homeschool my kids, but if you do all the power to you. Ifyou don't go over the program and just stimulate them, as long as they go see/make some friends at clubs (music, sport, craftmanship, whatever) or stuff like that, they won't be that behind in highschool. If you are actually good and present enough to teach them STEM specifics, they can even be ahead (in my experience this is rare, but this might be skewed by the population of homeschooling parents that will actually send their kid in summer science camps). We need to stop thinking of school as a place of learning only. School should be stimulating, a place to get friends and to be in touch with knowledge.
sn0w_crash 4y ago
kthejoker2 4y ago
This comments section is an unhelpful dumpster fire of hot takes and revisionism. Back away slowly.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Yes. I had to doom scroll all the way down to find the best comment
kjhgkjghkj 4y ago
I'm encouraged by the comments on this article. It shows that finally, it's ok to dedicate some critical analysis to the downsides of Covid restrictions.
taeric 4y ago
I can't but think this is overstated. And I agree that shutting school was probably unnecessary.

62 points by fortran77 4y ago

add this to the possibly permanent degradation of cognitive function, and we may be witnessing an unprecedented species wide debilitation. I wonder how much this might actually slow us down, imagine an Einstein who never got beyond the clerks job because brain fog stopped his discoveries

Fronzie 4y ago
Leaded gasoline has been a former experiment in population-wide reduction of intelligence and increase of aggressiveness. Supposedly that affected that 80's, but I am not aware of systematic studies on that.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Lots of links starting from here: https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-tragedy-how-the-car-and-gas-industry-knew-about-the-health-risks-of-leaded-fuel-but-sold-it-for-100-years-anyway-173395 https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-tragedy-how-the-car...
  - asah 4y ago
    thx! TIL leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s primarily because it clogged catalytic converters needed to end smog, not because of health reasons! (smog used to be terrible - I lived through the latter half of that period, am I can't even relate to how awful it used to be... friends and I remember walking in midtown Manhattan, blowing our noses and it being black... I can't even imagine pre-1980 let alone pre-1970... https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d )
    - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
      > leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s ... In automobiles. Lead is very much in use for aircraft fuel, just google AVGAS.
      - andrepd 4y ago
        It's absolutely bonkers to me that recreational fliers can still rain toxic lead on people below.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  And yet the US didn’t seem to crash and burn? HN is preoccupied with intelligence to the point of hysteria.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    I enjoyed seeing your other comment[s] in this mess of a thread. Good luck!
vnorilo 4y ago
that a present-day Von Neumann is probably somewhere working on ad/fintech is in many ways even more depressing.
- jleyank 4y ago
  Yup. Todays best and brightest for the most part are working hard to sell ads and track users of smartphones.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  certainly, market system misallocates a ton of resources. We need to recalibrate high value + high status

achow 4y ago

Butterfly Effect is not accounted for (how many innovation we would lose are not quantifiable). Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less... by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

headsoup 4y ago

I think there is something wrong with an attitude that children not in school are apparently unable to learn and develop. And something even more horribly wrong if that is true.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
The "in school" part is important here. Children don't have to be in a classroom, but they do need a good teacher, proper resources, etc. for them to learn. Many weren't even getting these basics pre-covid, so when it did hit, they were completely lost.
- treeman79 4y ago
  My wife teaches kindergarten. We have small children. They absolutely need to be in person at that age. Her School stopped virtual learning early because it just wasn’t working. We all got Covid because of it. It sucked but was better for kids.
AzzieElbab 4y ago
You are projecting. For many families that is indeed the case. There is no one at home to provide either education or motivation for many different reasons
jonathanstrange 4y ago
Why? We're social beings and it is extremely important for children to be with other children, especially in a setting where not all of them are best friends with each other or family. How else would they learn social skills? You seem to assume that it would be good if school was dispensable, but why would you think that?
- vitno 4y ago
  Why would you assume the ideal environment for learning social skills is in a school with children interacting primarily with other poorly developed children? Life experience and growth shouldn't be confined to a standard classroom.

kalaido 4y ago

Wondering how many people who are commenting here, actually have children themselves. Because how I see it (as a parent) school closures itself are only the tip of the iceberg...the schools which reopened with harsh mask, social distancing and constant disinfect your hands rules etc..are at least equally as bad for the development of a child

Markoff 4y ago
it's easy to see, anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school, but there are also enlightened childless people who understand how wrong is it even without having children
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- imustbeevil 4y ago
  > anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school Or like, not seeing everything as black and white. We had to do something because the hospitals were overflowing. When all the hospital beds are full of old covid patients slowly dying, every other person who gets injured is receiving treatment on the floor in the hallway, or not at all. You can have all the nuanced discussion you want about the degree of which any of the controls were implemented, but your position cannot be that we should have done nothing. What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up.
  - Markoff 4y ago
    > What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up. ROFL Yeah, that worked so great for China or for everyone since we had flu. Closing schools had no impact on virus, not saving hospitals from overflowing. Hospitals were not overflowing with school kids or their parents.

willcipriano 4y ago

Even after all this the schools around me have the stones to tell parents that they can't take their kids on vacation for a week during the school year because they might miss something and fall behind.

heurisko 4y ago
If you have (in the UK) 30 children being taken out of school at various time for holidays, the it turns into a nightmare of catching up.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  So? They pass the relevant tests, they move up. They fail, they get held back. Surely there is a middle ground between kid missing half the school year and a week of vacation.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    It isn't the intact families that make effort to spend time together that struggle in school frankly. My friends kids are straight A students they still make threats that they are going to take him to court.
  - heurisko 4y ago
    No, it's the expectation on the teacher to provide material for 30 children to catch up, for a week each. It's a nightmare for the teacher, who then has less time left for the children who didn't go on holiday to progress.
BrianOnHN 4y ago
Sounds like you would be the perfect candidate for virtual schooling. Leave the in-person schooling for kids and parents that really have no other option. Remember, for some kids school is the only safe place where they can also get a decent meal. I think it's best if our underfunded teachers focus on those kids instead of working extra to enable your vacation lifestyle.

bananapear 4y ago

The sad thing is that none of this was inevitable. A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. We'll be counting the costs of this hysteria for decades to come, when the lives of those "saved" are long over.

mercy_dude 4y ago
BrianOnHN 4y ago
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old. Also why medicare is the US makes no sense to me.
- refurb 4y ago
  That’s seems extreme. Nothing wrong with providing medical care to the elderly.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Something wrong with medical care for 80+ year olds being a political priority and ensuring every child gets a nutritious lunch at school not being a political priority. My grandpa got taxpayer funded dialysis at 95+ while I was offered defrosted cardboard pizza for lunch everyday, and would have had to pay for it.
    - Nullabillity 4y ago
      You can do both, it's not an either/or.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

jl6 4y ago

Data point: my kids are doing fine. They hated lockdown, but who didn’t? They aren’t behind in either academic or social terms. However, they had parents who supported them throughout with home learning, extracurricular learning, love and encouragement, and a network of friends and families in similar conditions who worked together to keep up virtual contact and socialisation. What I worry about are the kids who didn’t have this kind of support. We had the resources to compensate for lockdown. A lot of families didn’t In the final evaluation, I expect this will result in a deepening rich-poor divide. This is somewhat ironic considering it was predominantly leftward politicians advocating for more/deeper lockdowns that disproportionately harm the poor, and rightward politicians advocating for relaxing lockdowns and sacrificing the elderly.

andrepd 4y ago
You don't even need to expect: that is exactly, spot-on what happened. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/784041/ado2022-learning-losses.pdf https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/784041/a...

orwin 4y ago

Not really, the real disaster is the lack of stimulation. I mean, unless for high-school students, everything that you learn will be re-taught eventually. I missed half a year (well, 5 month) and didn't go over divisions, still the next year was fraction and honestly, i wasn't less prepared than my friends. I won't homeschool my kids, but if you do all the power to you. Ifyou don't go over the program and just stimulate them, as long as they go see/make some friends at clubs (music, sport, craftmanship, whatever) or stuff like that, they won't be that behind in highschool. If you are actually good and present enough to teach them STEM specifics, they can even be ahead (in my experience this is rare, but this might be skewed by the population of homeschooling parents that will actually send their kid in summer science camps). We need to stop thinking of school as a place of learning only. School should be stimulating, a place to get friends and to be in touch with knowledge.

sn0w_crash 4y ago

kthejoker2 4y ago

This comments section is an unhelpful dumpster fire of hot takes and revisionism. Back away slowly.

skinnymuch 4y ago
Yes. I had to doom scroll all the way down to find the best comment

kjhgkjghkj 4y ago

I'm encouraged by the comments on this article. It shows that finally, it's ok to dedicate some critical analysis to the downsides of Covid restrictions.

taeric 4y ago

I can't but think this is overstated. And I agree that shutting school was probably unnecessary.