Calculations and Discourses of Deficit in Indian Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic: ‘Learning Loss’

This essay shows how the ‘learning loss’ discourse in Indian education was produced and circulated during the COVID-19 pandemic. It critically examines how crisis narratives shape educational governance and narrow how learning is imagined in moments of disruption.

Published in Rethinking Education in the Context of Post-Pandemic South Asia

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Abstract

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools were closed down in India in March 2020. Since then, like several other nations, conversations about the pandemic’s impact on education in India have been often animated by a discourse of learning loss. This term has been widely circulated in the media, policy circles and public imagination, and continues to govern the actions and imaginations of policymakers, think-tanks and school systems in India even now. Despite a growing pushback against the learning loss discourse around the globe due its reductive assumptions about learning and its close ties with standardised testing, the term has been largely rendered commonsensical in India. 

In this paper, I critically examine the concept of learning loss in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. What is claimed to be ‘lost’? What evidence is deployed to justify those claims? What work is done by the circulation of this term? In questioning who manufactures, justifies and circulates the learning loss discourse, this paper adds to the emerging critical scholarship on crisis narratives in education during the pandemic. Additionally, by foregrounding the potential risks of this discourse for learning, this paper briefly offers asset-centred perspectives that can help drive more constructive and holistic educational governance and teaching as children return to schools in India.