If history is “a race between education and catastrophe”, as H.G. Wells once put it, education seemed until recently to be winning. In 1950, only about half of adults globally had any schooling; now at least 85 percent do. Between 2000 and 2018, the proportion of school-age children not enrolled in classes fell from 26 percent to 17 percent. But the rapid rise in attendance masks an ugly truth: many pupils were spending years behind desks but learning very little. In 2019, the World Bank started keeping count of the number of children who still cannot read by the time they finish primary school. It found that less than half of ten-year-olds in developing countries (which grudgingly host 90 percent of the world’s children) can read and understand a simple story.

Then the pandemic struck and hundreds of millions of pupils were locked out of school. At first, when it was not yet known whether children were vulnerable to Covid-19 or were likely to spread the virus to older people, school closures were a prudent precaution. But in many countries they continued long after it became clear that the risks of reopening classrooms were relatively small. During the first two years of the pandemic, more than 80 percent of schooldays in Latin America and South Asia were disrupted by closures of some sort. Even today, schools in some countries such as the Philippines, remain shut to most pupils, leaving their minds to atrophy.

Globally, the harm that school closures have done to children has vastly outweighed any benefits they may have had for public health. The World Bank says the share of ten-year-olds in middle and low-income countries who can not read and understand a simple story has risen from 57 percent in 2019 to roughly 70 percent. If they lack such elementary skills, they will struggle to earn a good living. The bank estimates that $21 trillion (Rs.1,677 lakh crore) will be wiped off their lifetime earnings — equivalent to about 20 percent of the world’s GDP.

Scandalously, many governments spend more on rich pupils than on poor ones. Moreover, too little development aid goes to education, and some is self-interested. A chunk goes to donor countries’ own universities to fund scholarships for the relatively well-to-do from poor countries. Such exchanges are welcome, but funding primary schools in poor countries does more good.

At present, a quarter of countries don’t have any plans to help children regain learning lost during the pandemic, according to a survey carried out earlier this year by Unicef. Another quarter have inadequate catch-up strategies. The same energy that was once poured into building schools and filling up classrooms should now be used to improve lessons that take place within them. At stake is the future not only of the generation scarred by the pandemic, but of all the pupils who will come after them.