There's an excellent piece over at Focus this morning....written by six journalists (H. Broeg, G. Dometeit, M. Etzold, A. Grosse-Halbuer, B. Hauser, and M. Krones). I strongly recommend a read of the piece.
Their discussion? The opening of schools has occurred, and it's a complicated situation to assess the quarantine period and the way that kids handled school outage.
Some kids, with educated parents.....did well, and are where they should be. Some kids, with marginally educated parents....did not so well, and are not where they should be. In this case, they are talking about 4th grade kids.
The journalists even acknowledge that some of the kids were in homes where no internet connect was possible, and in some cases.....no email addresses.
Earlier this year, I noted a statistic that popped-up....that 84-percent of Germans now have some form of internet connectivity. It might be a router in the house.....it might be a smart-phone....it might be a tab that they lug around for school or work.
Back in 2010, it amounted to around 72-percent of Germans have internet. If you go back to 2005, it was near 55-percent.
In a lot of cases, it's simply the age level of people, who see the internet as complicated or that it has no real return value (I could see that understanding). In some cases, it's a cost-factor and if you were barely getting by.....then it's something that you don't need.
As for the kids behind? Well....it puts the next school year (the fifth grade in this case) in a difficult position because you might have to waste a quarter of the time bringing the marginalized kids up a notch.
A problem for the next twelve months? I would imagine that folks will be talking about this issue for a long-time and some type of teacher-assistant funding will have to be created, with more help designed for the kids hurt by the down-time.
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