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हिन्दी 
When the world looks back on how the years of the pandemic affected education, there will inevitably be stories of anxious teens, isolated toddlers and frantic parents (how to minimise screen time; how to juggle it all; how to teach caring and sharing in the absence of peers?) woven into the tale.
The truth is, all children slipped into lives that were somehow poorer.
What two years of your childhood would you choose to delete?
The earliest ones, in the hopes you wouldn’t remember, and could make up for the formative loss somehow? The early years of uniformed school, with their precious first report cards, class photos, and first true friendships? All of early college life?
Every child has lost, and must contend with the loss: of high-school friendships that never reached their natural conclusion; fancy-dress contests where they stood alone, dressed as Krishna, while a parent took a picture for the class WhatsApp group.
And they, of course, were the lucky ones. Millions felt the losses of the pandemic so keenly that school was a distant consideration.
Millions more simply could not log on. Had to share a device with a sibling or neighbour. Climb a hill for a stable internet connection. Stay quietly logged out in a darkened room.
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Research is only now beginning to show the effects.
How vital is the classroom itself? Three core areas have reflected the absence of this shared space: basic learning, screen use, and behaviour.
Let’s start with the first. Reading and arithmetic levels fell sharply and are only now seeing recovery, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, released by the NGO Pratham Foundation in January, shows.
The proportion of children in Class 3 who were able to read at a Class 2 level went from 23.6% in 2014 to 27.3% in 2018, then plummeted to 20.5% in 2022, recovering to 27.1% in 2024.
Meanwhile, the proportion of Class 5 students who could read at a Class 2 level went from 48% in 2014 to 50.5% in 2018, plummeted to 42.8% in 2022 and has since recovered somewhat, to reach 48.8% in 2024.
The proportion of Class 3 students who could do basic subtraction rose from 25.4% in 2014 to 28.2% in 2018 and fell to 25.9% in 2022. In 2024, the proportion stands at 33.7%.
The steady recovery is heartening, but classrooms or no, in a troubling development, the screens are staying fixed in place.
Cellphone usage among students has boomed. In an acknowledgement of this, the ASER 2024 report included a section on digital literacy for the first time.
Among 14-16-year-olds, it found, the proportion of children who own a smartphone rose from 19% in 2023 to 31% in 2024. Most are now using their phones to tweet, scroll, create and watch Reels, rather than mainly for classroom activity.
If the phone seemed like the young person’s best friend before, it has actually filled that role in the vacant pandemic years, and the impact of this shift will require study.
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Education, overall, suffered as a fallout of an Indian economy in shock and contracting, for the first time in 40 years.
An estimated 14 million jobs were lost between January 2020 and October 2022, according to research by Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis and the think-tank Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). Small private schools closed.
Whether as a result of job losses, school closures or distress migrations of various kinds, the proportion of out-of-school children in the 6-10 age group shot up, from 1.8% in 2018 to 5.3% to 2020, an ASER (Rural) survey from 2020 showed.
Still more children found themselves moved from private schools to less-well-equipped government-run ones. Sometimes this shift was driven by the fact that the government school also offered a mid-day meal, and occasionally handed out staples such as foodgrains.
The 2024 survey shows, hearteningly, that these trends are also being reversed.
Enrolment has seen an almost-complete reversal, Wilma Wadhwa, director of the Pratham research unit ASER Centre, wrote in an analysis report. Children are being moved back from government schools to private ones, across grades and genders. “(This) is not particularly surprising given that the economy has recovered in other sectors as well,” she wrote.
The impact of the disruption, anxiety and fear of the pandemic years, however, is showing up in a myriad other ways.
Schools across India reopened in January 2021, but classes moved back online as the devastating second wave struck, in April-May. Schools reopened again in September, but moved intermittently online during the third wave, in January 2022. Amid bottles of sanitiser, stacks of masks, scrapped assemblies and continued uncertainty, school life finally resumed, in June 2022.
By this time, teachers and principals say, children weren’t writing by hand as they had before they left; they had lost the habit over two years. Essay-style exams had, in many cases, been replaced by online multiple-choice tests, and this habit was hard to relearn too.
But perhaps the biggest challenges have been two aspects of behaviour: concentration, and conflict. “Attention spans have shrunk tremendously,” says Pooja Ramchandani, principal of Mumbai’s HR college.
Younger students are unable to interact age-appropriately, getting into fights more easily, says a school principal, adding that this problem has been easing, gradually, since schools reopened.
The writing remains a worry, especially at exam time, teachers and principals agree. As pandemic-era problems go, we’ve all, of course, seen worse. But how long will the wake of this great disruption stretch? What will later ripples reveal? Are the kids really all right?
It will be years before we know for sure.
(snehal.fernandes@htlive.com)
