In the Bolivian mountainous city of La Paz, Maribel Sanchez’s youth have spent much of the more than two years huddled together on a tiny smartphone screen to take online categories amid a long lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The two boys, older than 11 and 8 years old, were lost categories when their schedules collided because the circle of relatives did not have a computer. Despite everything, Bolivian schoolchildren did not return to face-to-face categories until March of this year, with many still not being full-time.
History echoes the region, from Mexico to Brazil.
Latin America has one of the worst school closure records in the world, according to a World Bank report, which shows that children here faced around 60 weeks of schools totally or partially closed between March 2020 and March this year.
This is only South Asia and twice the point of Europe, Central and East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa or the Pacific. In North America, there were prolonged partial closures, but only seven weeks of full closures compared to 29 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This threatens to set back a generation of young people by a decade, according to some experts, in terms of levels of schooling, which weighs on income and employment clients in the coming years.
“With the virtual classrooms, the little ones were not informed of anything. They were distracted. My son, who is in CP, has not been informed of anything. Nothing!” said Sanchez as he waited to pick up his little ones outside a school in LaPaz.
Emanuela di Gropello, a researcher at the World Bank, said Latin American schoolchildren would see a 12 percent drop in lifetime income due to gaps in schooling due to the pandemic.
“These other young people entering the labor market will necessarily see a long-term decline in their wages,” he said.
In Argentina, Mercedes Porto of the Foundation, which works with young people, said the school formula had “lost” a cohort of students with around 1 million young people who did not return to school after the virtual education period.
Andres Uzin Pacheco, an education expert and school principal at a business school in La Paz, said the effect would be lasting and severe.
“This locked up generation is going to suffer the consequences, only for five years, but for the next 20 or 30 years, which reaches all their training, even academic, and their pro-life,” he said.