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I can't imagine that the loss could be any more than two years of school attendance, which puts them at the same level as their global peers who went through the same thing. The only reason we think of this as a huge loss is because we don't have free public education, but instead make education far more expensive and difficult to get the older you get. The dilemma isn't about how we can educate children, it's how can we educate children while simultaneously booting them out of a fairly piss-poor for most educational system immediately after high school or any significant pause during high school, to give them the option of a system that costs $15-20K a year in order to be qualified for unpaid internships.

If we lose a generation, it will be because we wanted to, not because we didn't have the ability to educate them.

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This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to grow up. There are certain skills, like learning to speak, that can only be done at a certain age. Once that age is past it is not possible to ever pick them up and be fluent at them.

Covid for under 12s was a disaster. We might as well have fed those children lead for the mental retardation we've caused them for the rest of their lives. Over a virus that killed precisely none of them.

> This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to grow up. There are certain skills, like learning to speak, that can only be done at a certain age. Once that age is past it is not possible to ever pick them up and be fluent at them.

We can at least be thankful none of those skills are learned at school.

Except being forced to wear masks does interfere, and I'm not just talking about the kids. The kids need to be able to see the faces of the adults around them.

It's a bit more than that. One under-appreciated component of universal, compulsory education is that there is an ingrained cultural acceptance that kids go to school and at least attempt to learn.

Here's a report from where I live (Wales, UK):

https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2022-04/a...

Overall attendance is continuing to decline in the single-digit range, and there are double-digit declines in attendance amongst selected disadvantaged groups.

Yes, education is mostly a product of culture. Just look at the Jewish people.

Universal compulsory education is a collective affirmation of the value of education in a society, and the extent to which schooling is “taken seriously” is a reflection of how deeply the society embraces this value.

To add on to your mention of cultural aspects. It was the cultural shared experience amongst the citizenry that Adam Smith argued was why public education was so important.

Why would we expect "learning loss" (whatever the term is for reduced learning outcomes) to follow such a neat trend?

If you neglect a kid for a year, then we don't expect the damage to persist only for a year. Why would this be any different?

What is a year in the end? You got dozens of them, you can spare one if you really have to, to preserve life, say.

The damage comes from the tiering of education, where anyone not "ready" at the next stage doesn't get access to it at all. That structure is a policy decision we've made, not a necessary fact of education or life.

That's not how it works though. You can't skip socialisation and languages for 2-3 years and expect to just pick these thing as if you were 5 years old again.

And even if you could your second point is moot, it is a social construct but it will stay like that, so it end up being a fact of life for everyone.

What other structure is there? All knowledge and skill is based off of more basic knowledge and skills. If someone doesn't have a grasp of simple addition, calculus isn't going to make much sense. That's true at the lowest levels and the highest levels.

Now if you're arguing that the way we test if someone is ready for the next level of a given field is done poorly, that's different and there could be a strong case for it depending on the field and school.

> which puts them at the same level as their global peers who went through the same thing.

I don't think the problem has anything to do with country vs country loss or competition. It's about children simply losing out on essential education and development, which makes life a bigger struggle going forward. It's especially important for young children, where language and fundamental math acquisition are incredibly important and harder to establish as they age.

It's easy to teach someone calculus if they've had exposure to math since they were 5. It's hard to teach someone algebra if they weren't sitting down with an actual teacher and learning basic arithmetic until 3rd grade. Early math is a hands-on thing and parents often aren't good at teaching it (many being math-phobes themselves).

And that's not even getting into a lack of face-to-face interaction with peers among young kids.

I have to wonder if social anxiety and similar issues will be more common among kids who went through strict covid lockdowns.

Most private schools did 100% remote learning for a very short period of time, where I live most were only doing remote learning for 2 or 3 months, and then students were back to full in person classes. The public school system in contrast did 100% remote learning for 6 months and then implemented a system of A or B attendance for an additional 6 months where every other week was remote learning. As usual those able to pay for education have a huge leg up against their peers. The leg up will be substantial over the course of their lifetime.

> which puts them at the same level as their global peers who went through the same thing.

What are you talking about? The headline says learning loss is a _global_ disaster. Who are the "global peers" of a population that consists of all the world's children?

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