Answer:

,April, UNESCO reported 192 countries had closed all schools and universities, affecting more than 90 PERCENT of the world’s learners: almost 1.6 billion children and young people. While some governments are starting to order teachers and students back to work, education—one of the most important drivers in human capital investment—continues to be largely closed for business.

How long schools will remain closed, how student learning will be affected, and how greatly this will affect the poorest and most vulnerable populations remain difficult to say. We do not YET know enough about what happens next: Questions range from whether it is possible for recovered patients to be reinfected to how long it will take to develop, license, and distribute a viable vaccine. But we do know that learning will indeed be lost, and that those losses will not likely be evenly distributed.

When children lose out on education, they lose out on future OPPORTUNITIES INCLUDING economic benefits, such as additional earnings, with far-reaching consequences. Some modeling suggests that the loss of learning during the extraordinary systemic crisis of World War II still had negative impact on former students’ lives some 40 years later. And neither is the impact of lost learning CONFINED to the individual level: For whole societies closing down education today