World’s first post-pandemic treaty must agree to never again close schools; South Asia can lead it

The biggest human catastrophe of the pandemic cannot be found in the public health or economic realms. Nay, the biggest catastrophe of them all – as Sri Lanka, India and all of South Asia will soon appreciate – is that of the world’s “third bucket kids”, ousted from all forms of schooling during the pandemic due to school closures and then education systems collapse.

To be clear, a “third bucket kid” is one who is in neither physical school (“Bucket 1”) nor virtual school (“Bucket 2”). The child is in no school at all – full stop.

There are, at present, well over half a billion such third bucket kids the world over, with over 150 million in India alone. Pakistan may have as many as 25 million third bucket kids, Bangladesh 40 million, and Nepal seven million. The United States may have upwards of 15 million in the third bucket, with Canada and the United Kingdom each approaching 200,000. All of these half billion kids were happily on the cricket and football pitches but a year and half ago.

How could this be? What happened? Answer: The mass, improvised closure of schools across the globe in March of 2020 – arguably the largest copy-cat policy move in human history – led to large-scale catastrophe almost immediately. For most decision-makers, despite the best of intentions, did not quite realise what they were closing, and what human dynamics would ensue once the doors shut.

In South Asia and many parts of Africa, as soon as the schools closed, millions of children returned to their villages. Many girls – even star students – were married off early. Boys and girls alike, at both primary and secondary levels, joined the labour market. Any return to education would soon become highly improbable.

Even with the advent of online schooling, huge numbers of children, in a plurality of countries around the world – starting here in Sri Lanka – were abruptly cut off from education due to non-access to the Internet or to a reliable electronic device.

And in cases where virtual schooling did take place, in Sri Lanka as in Western countries, many middle and high school students would eventually defect from schooling because the “exit costs” to dropping out were negligible – that is, a matter merely of shutting off a Zoom call or turning off a phone in the absence of the “walls”, community and in-person friendship and mentorship that once gave school meaning. 

One of the worst consequences of virtual schooling – including for the 6-10% of students in Sri Lanka in the “second bucket” – was what children had to undergo in homes where conditions for learning were suboptimal. Many kids were trapped for months in abusive homes where domestic violence was the norm. And students who relied on school for their mid-day meal were nutritionally deprived. 

If South Asia’s massive third bucket catastrophe portends grave social and political destabilisation of individual countries, it also signals multiple devastations in the entire region in the coming decades. In Sri Lanka, a class of undereducated and emotionally challenged young people will enter a society in which serious and unprecedented economic crises are in play. This situation could soon pose a threat to national security. India, for its part, will have great difficulty competing economically and geopolitically with China for the foreseeable future. After all, China, like most of East Asia, experienced almost no third bucket collapse during the pandemic.

What’s to be done? Sri Lanka and the region now have one major moral and strategic imperative, and one major moral and strategic opportunity.

The urgent imperative is to find and reintegrate as many of the region’s 300 million or so third bucket kids into schooling as possible. This will require door-to-door campaigns across the country, at scale, supported by high-level political and community messaging to the effect that these kids are “wanted” and “needed” back in school (at once!). A careful, granular choreography of return is needed for every child, according to his or her circumstances and needs. Countries like Sri Lanka have excellent provincial and grassroots systems in place (e.g. some 14,500 Grama Niladhari divisions), where such door-to-door campaigns can be instantly rolled out to encourage kids to return to school, in addition to using the Compulsory Education Act (at least in spirit). 

The major strategic opportunity for Sri Lanka and South Asia is to turn the region’s historic third bucket catastrophe into a statement of collective purpose never to repeat what has befallen the children of the world. We now know very clearly – on scientific and sociological evidence alike – that schools must never-ever close, except in war. For as soon as they shutter, huge disintegration occurs on the ground, in the human condition, with multi-generational consequences.

Sri Lanka should therefore unite with other countries in the region and on all continents on the first major international treaty of the post-pandemic period – a treaty that addresses head-on the pandemic’s leading calamity. The treaty should bind states – unitary and federal alike – in legal and normative commitment to never close schools except in the most extreme emergencies like wars or natural disasters – and that this should happen only after all other institutions of state and society have closed, for very short periods, and with full assurances that systems leakage into the third bucket is prevented (i.e. through the provision of laptops and Internet access, home visits by teachers and officials, and, inter alia, extended schooling opportunities on the return side).

Every major international trauma in modern history has produced a new set of international instruments, conventions and protocols to preclude the repetition of disaster. Let all governments, leaders and decision-makers henceforth know, in their bones, that, for the balance of the complex century to come, school closures are, in all senses, a no-go zone. For now we understand.

(Irvin Studin is the Chair of the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic), President of The Institute for 21st Century Questions, and Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Global Brief Magazine.)   

(Tara de Mel is the former Secretary of Education of Sri Lanka and Vice Chairperson of the National Education Commission. She is the Co-Founder of Education Forum Sri Lanka.)