FESE HandBook v03c 15112023 MEV- COMPLETO - Flipbook - Página 214
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FUNDAMENTO TEÓRICO DEL PROGRAMA LIDERAZGO PARA UNA EDUCACIÓN INTEGRAL / SEGUNDA PARTE
to be that generation entirely devoted to them? Preparing children to live in
a 4.0 society as a whole is the challenge for school systems.
Technology is great, powerful and everywhere, but it is still just a tool
—maybe even the context— it is not the aim or the mission of education.
Education is about human development; about making sure all children
and youngsters rise to their full potential as individuals, as members of
society, as members of the ecosphere. Education is about androrithms
(Gerd, 2019) orst and only secondly about algorithms.
THE PANDEMIC AND LEARNING LOSSES
At the end of 2019, the Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization to the existence of anomalous cases of pneumonia in the city
of Wuhan and, on January 7th 2020, conormed the discovery of a new
strain of coronavirus. On January 30th, the WHO declared the outbreak
of the new coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and on March 11 classioed the virus as a pandemic. And so, the world
stopped to oght the pandemic of Covid-19. During that time, although in
a framework of less freedom arising from the cononements and restrictions on face-to-face activities, we had an experience of total autonomy
for schools insofar as all operating rules were suspended.
Different countries adopted different strategies. But in a great number
of them, closedowns were imposed for some weeks, and weeks turned to
months and closedowns were lifted and imposed until early 2022, when
social contact mostly returned to normal all over the western world.
And yet, despite the theoretical limitations of non presential teaching
and learning, the effects of the pandemic on school aged children, measured by gains in their results in standardized tests is not clear. These
learning losses have been presented with a strong emphasis 8Learning
loss: a Covid-19 mass casualty9 (Patrinos et. al., 2023), as more data comes
in, we see that some students are doing surprisingly well. The orst strong
indicator are the results of the PIRLS literacy test (https://pirls2021.org/
results). Though in the majority of participating countries there are losses, in others there are not and others still register improvements. Furthermore, the losses are more often than not of smaller magnitude then one
would expect. The results of PISA 2022 show a decline in acheivement
but the OECD claims it is not possible to know how much of this is due
to the pandemic and how much is the continuation of previous decline.
If we look at Portugal4, all external evaluation of students that took place
4. Being a national and working in Portugal, it is the country I know best. The results of Portugal must not
be generalized to other countries, but they do reinforce that the issue of learning losses due to Covid is not
as straightforward as it seems reading the orst literature that came out.
