W’Bank Warns of ‘Learning Crisis’ in Nigeria, Others

Obinna Chima
The World Bank has warned that millions of young students in Nigeria and other low and middle-income countries face the prospect of lost opportunity and lower wages in later life because their primary and secondary schools are failing to educate them to succeed in life.

Warning of ‘a learning crisis’ in global education, a the new report by the multilateral institution stated that schooling without learning was not just a wasted development opportunity, but also a great injustice to children and young people worldwide.

The World Development Report 2018 titled: “Learning to Realise Education’s Promise,” argued that without learning, education would fail to deliver on its promise to eliminate extreme poverty and create shared opportunity and prosperity for all.
It noted that even after several years in school, millions of children cannot read, write or do basic math.
According to the Bank, this learning crisis is widening social gaps instead of narrowing them. It added that young students who are already disadvantaged by poverty, conflict, gender or disability reach young adulthood without even the most basic life skills.

“This learning crisis is a moral and economic crisis,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said.
“When delivered well, education promises young people employment, better earnings, good health, and a life without poverty. For communities, education spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.

“But these benefits depend on learning, and schooling without learning is a wasted opportunity. More than that, it’s a great injustice: the children whom societies fail the most are the ones who are most in need of a good education to succeed in life.”

The report recommended concrete policy steps to help developing countries resolve this dire learning crisis in the areas of stronger learning assessments, using evidence of what works and what doesn’t to guide education decision-making; and mobilising a strong social movement to push for education changes that champion ‘learning for all.’

According to the report, when third grade students in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda were asked recently to read a sentence such as “The name of the dog is Puppy” in English or Kiswahili, three-quarters did not understand what it said.

Also, it stated that in rural India, nearly three-quarters of students in grade three could not solve a two-digit subtraction such as “46 – 17”—and by grade five, half still could not do so. “Although the skills of Brazilian 15-year-olds have improved, at their current rate of improvement they will not reach the rich-country average score in math for 75 years. In reading, it will take 263 years.
“These statistics do not account for 260 million children who, for reasons of conflict, discrimination, disability, and other obstacles, are not enrolled in primary or secondary school.
“While not all developing countries suffer from such extreme learning gaps, many fall far short of levels they aspire to.

“Leading international assessments on literacy and numeracy show that the average student in poor countries performs worse than 95 per cent of the students in high-income countries—meaning such a student would be singled out for remedial attention in a class in those countries,” it added.

The report showed that many high-performing students in middle-income countries—young men and women who achieved in the top quarter of their groups—would rank in the bottom quarter in a wealthier country.
The report, written by a team directed by World Bank Lead Economists, Deon Filmer and Halsey Rogers, identified what drives these learning shortfalls—not only the ways in which teaching and learning breaks down in too many schools, but also the deeper political forces that cause these problems to persist.

The report noted that when countries and their leaders make “learning for all” a national priority, education standards can improve dramatically. “For example, from a war-torn country with very low literacy rates in the 1950s, South Korea achieved universal enrolment by 1995 in high-quality education through secondary school—its young people performed at the highest levels on international learning assessments.

“Vietnam’s 2012 results from an OECD test for high school students in math, science, and reading called PISA, showed that its 15-year-olds performed at the same level as those in Germany—even though Vietnam is a much poorer country.
“The only way to make progress is to ‘find truth from facts.’ If we let them, the facts about education reveal a painful truth. For too many children, schooling does not mean learning,” World Bank Chief Economist, Paul Romer explained.