We could make up for the covid disruption of schooling if we try

livemint.com:

All schools were shut in March 2020 as covid engulfed the world. In India, schools did not return to normalcy till January 2022. Four years after the pandemic hit, it is useful to take stock of where we are and what we have learnt.

As we dealt with the crisis on many fronts during those first few months, some things became clear about school education. First was a loss of learning. While it should have been obvious that shut schools meant children will not learn what they must as part of their curricular education, it took a while for the extent of the problem to be realized.

And it took even more time for a widespread understanding that children were also forgetting what they had learnt earlier. Over a period of time, many studies underlined the depth and breadth of this problem. Second, efforts to compensate for shut schools were inadequate.

While responses varied from state to state, on an average these efforts could not help most students. It also became clear that online education is ineffective for school children. This is not only a matter of access to devices and the internet, but inherent to the nature of learning at this age.

In short, by January 2022, there was a staggering loss of learning across grades all over the country. Third, schools play significant roles in addition to being educational institutions. Society has become so habituated to schools that we just take them for granted.