Research into damage caused by school closures for COVID...
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about the devastating effects of school closures across the world, and how they impact on our children and the world at large and small scale. We also discuss the long-term impact of these closures, and why we should be concerned.
Transcript
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the fact is that, you know, there really hasn't been any sort of official national account of
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school closures. Okay, let's look at exactly what happened. You know, our paper is really
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one of the only of its kind that are looking at this. And there really hasn't been any kind of
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government level official assessment of that. And that is sort of a depressing fact. And maybe
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governments are working on that behind the scenes. And I'm not aware of that. But certainly learning
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from their mistakes would be good. I think that, you know, we really like I like I said, in terms of
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the academic student success, you know, we see that there has been learning loss, but it is very
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preliminary. And we really won't know the full impact of school closures until, you know, maybe 10 or 20
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years from now, because effective, even the World Bank has has data showing that if you actually have
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missed classroom time for kids, it results in basically years of effective schooling lost,
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which means that their their outcomes in life are going to be worse, they're going to be worse off.
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So it's going to decrease their lifetime earnings at an individual level. And it actually contributes
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to a decrease in GDP for the country as a whole, when kids are not in school, the amount that they
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should be in school when they're not learning. Of course, you know, I'll give the caveat that there
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are some kids who probably did really well in this environment that actually discovered that they
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loved homeschooling or something as a result. But there was a lot of kids whose parents had to
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continue to go to work, they had nobody at home helping them with with their schoolwork. And this
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is what we see, there are kids who basically disappeared, who just fell out of the school system
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completely. And so we won't know exactly the societal impacts of that for many years to come.
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But hopefully governments will pay attention to the fact that school closures are the root issue
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in a lot of what we will we are facing today and what we will face in the years to come.