Coronavirus, a burdened generation?

For many decades, those in charge of institutions and governments around the world have based their greatest social challenge on including the excluded, starting with the fact of literacy; however, the pandemic has reminded us that those who are unaware of the new technologies are digitally illiterate... and some are probably doubly illiterate, that is, doubly excluded in Africa, in many parts of Asia and of course in Latin America; although Europe also has fundamentally minority groups of immigrants and various vulnerable groups.

Every year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) publishes a document to monitor education around the world. In the GEM 2020 report related to inclusion in education "all means all", the organisation states that the world literacy rate (86%) indicates that 750 million adults in the world are illiterate.

In fact, it points out that "illiterates over 65 years of age are almost 40% more numerous than young people", and now the concern is that the number of young illiterates will once again increase and become a Covid-19 generation marked by school failure.

By what criteria? A long pandemic, which makes it difficult for students to be present in classrooms due to the increase in cases of contagion, forcing, in the first instance, the closure of schools and the continuation of studies at home; those with sufficient digital means to keep up with classes, homework, work submissions and exams will manage to finish... those who, although they want to study, lack the digital means to join the rest of their classmates will be left behind.

Secondly, many children are in areas of poverty, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where extreme poverty persists, and others in Asia in areas of civil conflict, war or instability; in the period from 2013 to 2017, there were more than 12,700 "attacks on educational centres in various parts of the world" affecting 21,000 students and educators.

We must add other dramatic data with children, adolescents and young immigrants alone or as refugees with their parents in other countries who are not receiving any educational attention.

In addition to the endemic problems surrounding the education sector, practices still persist: "Two African countries still prohibit the schooling of pregnant girls; 117 allow child marriages, while 20 have not yet ratified the International Labour Organisation's Convention 138, which prohibits child labour. In several Central and Eastern European countries Roma children are segregated in regular schools, and in Asia displaced persons, such as the Rohingya, are taught in parallel education systems.

UNESCO estimates that annual global education expenditure is US$4.7 billion, distributed as follows: 1) 65% is spent by the highest income countries, i.e. 3 billion dollars; 2) 0.5% in low income countries, i.e. some 22 billion dollars.

Governments contribute 79 per cent of total expenditure and households 20 per cent. Aid to education, despite reaching a peak in 2016, represents 12 per cent of total education expenditure in low-income countries and 2 per cent in lower middle-income countries. To meet the most basic needs of children in crisis situations, the share of education in humanitarian aid should be increased tenfold.

There is no such response capacity, what remains is the capacity to learn to correct what has been done wrong so far and what the pandemic has exposed.
So far, UNESCO speaks of "an exacerbation of exclusion" during the pandemic and believes that "some 40% of low- and lower-middle-income countries" have failed to support disadvantaged students during school closures.

"Even before the pandemic, 258 million children and young people were totally excluded from education, with poverty being the main obstacle to their access. In low- and middle-income countries, adolescents from the richest 20 per cent of all households are three times more likely to complete lower secondary education than those from the poorest households," the agency emphasizes.

Without doubt, the coronavirus could leave a generation of new 'ninis', young people who neither study nor work, socially dangerous because it will deepen the gaps and economically it is a waste of important skills.

We are not there for that, we have to structure a new educational model more in line with the real needs of the world of the 21st century, we have to give yes or no to the technological tools to all students as their new, very essential backpack.