And one day, suddenly, everything stopped. And, as Gabriel García Marquez would say in his novel, perhaps “It was inevitable”.
Rosita looks through the window of her house in Guayaquil and remembers her school, her teacher, and her classmates. She does not understand why she can no longer go out to play with her friends in the neighborhood or visit her grandmother, nor why her father has not come to visit her in almost a month.
The current spread of coronavirus poses a major public health challenge to every country in the world. Schools and their administrators may be the next in line to face the test, as these institutions have traditionally been a key channel of contagion of all sorts of illnesses. Let’s take a look at the case of China—when the virus became endemic, school authorities postponed sine die the beginning of classes in 31 provinces.
The promise of inclusive education in Latin America and the Caribbean is still far from achieved, especially for the thousands of children and youth with some disability in the region. The probability of attending school for children between 6 to 11 years with disabilities is 8 percentage points lower compared to children without disabilities. And in high school, this gap only widens.
When I tell my friends and family that I go to Barbados to work with the Ministry of Education, the looks usually tell a story of disbelief. “Work? Yeah, right” – is the answer as they picture me sitting under a palm tree looking at the sea.
Be discreet, smile more, soccer is for boys, play with this doll, don’t raise your voice, be a lady, eat a salad, girls are better at reading. Although women in Latin America and the Caribbean have advanced a lot in the past quarter century – gaining equal access to schooling and increasing their participation in politics and the labor market – kids are still raised with stereotypes about what a girl should be and do. Research has shown that children pick up on cultural stereotypes at a very young age.