by Kai Pflug
The title of this blog post is not mine – I took it straight from an editorial in The Economist magazine (issue of July 9, 2022).
The article discusses the consequences of the corona pandemic on children’s schooling, especially in less developed countries. Indeed, the consequences of the corona-related school closures are dramatic. According to the World Bank, the proportion of 10-year-olds in these countries who cannot read and understand a simple story has increased from 57% in 2019 to around 70%. The Economist rightly calls this a global emergency, emphasizing that almost every human problem can be alleviated with a good education — better-educated people are more likely to develop clean energy sources, invent new medicines, and have fewer children on average, which in turn allows parents to invest more in their education.
What does all this have to do with StayIN? StayIN is also committed to improving school education. Our approach focuses less on global inequity – the poor educational opportunities of a child in an underdeveloped country versus a child in a rich country. We focus on educational inequality within a rich country and start with StayIN in Hamburg. However, the positive results are the same as those mentioned by the Economist, though, of course, initially on a smaller scale. And while the basic idea behind StayIN came about before the start of the pandemic, it is obvious that Covid has further increased educational injustice and that a program like StayIN has become even more important.
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
Originally posted 2024-03-16 14:10:57.