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