Child illiteracy doubles in Brazil after pandemic, says Unicef

According to a study released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the percentage of illiterate Brazilian children, aged 7 to 9, doubled between 2019 and 2022, the same period in which authorities decided to keep schools closed as a supposed measure to prevent the health crisis caused by the Chinese virus.

The study used data from the continuous National Household Sample Survey (Pnad), from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

The percentage of seven-year-old children who cannot read and write jumped from 20.5% in 2019 to 25.2% in 2020, and continued to rise until 2022, when it reached 40.3%, practically double of the percentage recorded in 2019.

The illiteracy level of 8-year-old children rose from 8.5% in 2019 to 20.8% in 2022. The percentage of nine-year-old children who cannot read and write jumped from 4.4% , in 2019, to 9.5%, in 2022.

“The post-2020 period reveals a worrying increase in illiteracy rates, especially among younger children, breaking a trend of stability or slight decrease observed in previous years”, says an excerpt from the study.

Although the period analyzed coincides with the restrictive measures imposed by governments, which deprived children of access to school, Unicef ​​says that “this scenario suggests significant challenges in education, requiring a deeper investigation of the causes and interventions necessary to reverse them. it.”

In 2021, the People’s Gazette listed medical studies showing that the opening of schools was not a decisive factor in the spread of the coronavirus, and published analyzes by education entities and experts warning of the risks of keeping children away from schools for a long period.

In addition to harming literacy, studies showed, even at that time, that children and adolescents outside of school were at risk of being subjected to violence or suffering from food insecurity.

At the time, Gazeta aligned itself with pediatricians and educational entities in a campaign to reopen schools, while governors and judges insisted on keeping children away from classrooms even with a very low risk of developing a severe form of the disease in children and teenagers.