World Development Report - Education

What is the issue?

The World Bank has recently released its World Development Report, 2018.
The report, titled “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise”, focusses on education.
Among many of its findings, the report draws attention to the impact of malnutrition on children's education.

What are the highlights?

The report has warned of a learning crisis in global education particularly in low and middle-income countries like India.
It seemed to have made a rights based approach to education as evident in sub-sections titled Education as freedom, Education improves individual freedoms, Education benefits all of society.
It has stressed that schooling without learning was a wasted development opportunity and a great injustice to children worldwide.
India ranks second after Malawi in a list of 12 countries wherein a grade two student could not read a single word of a short text.
India also tops the list of seven countries in which a grade two student could not perform two-digit subtraction.
In rural India in 2016, only half of grade 5 students could fluently read text at the level of the grade 2 curriculum.

How is nutrition influencing education?

Stunting - Stunting is essentially one of the manifestations of poor nutrition.
The report points out the high under-five child stunting rates among the poor sections in low-income countries .
Strikingly, it highlights through MRI images, the difference in brain development between a stunted and a normal child.
This is reflected in the physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development of the child in early years.
This under-development ultimately prevents the child from learning well in later years.
Resultantly, despite the quality of education in schools, deprived children show relatively poor performance.
This translates into decreased opportunities and lower wages later in life.
Deprivation - The report brings out how intense deprivation can hinder the physical and mental development of children.
Deprivations could take the form of chronic malnutrition, unhealthy environments, or lack of nurture by caregivers.
This in effect undermines a child’s learning capabilities as it impairs the infants’ brain development.

What should be done?

This learning crisis is supposedly widening the social gaps instead of narrowing them.
Early childhood development programmes are aiming at compensating for poor children’s disadvantages.
However, it must be ensured that the programmes are resourced for nutritional inputs.

Importantly this should go along with a focus on antenatal and postnatal care, sanitation, and counselling of parents.
Reduction of child stunting should be one of the major moral imperatives of nations today as this ensures a quality human resource.

Source: The Hindu