Luming Illertacy Krisus: After Year-Long Lockdown, British Children Cannot Read or Write

What a bizarre image.
Which one of these values does the coronavirus lockdown embody? Definitely not respect, courage or honesty. Or Resilience. Perseverance, I guess!

The thing that I find most shocking about this is that no one could have predicted it.

RT:

London is working on a ‘catch-up’ education plan as hundreds of thousands of primary school children are struggling with basic reading and writing following months of Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, government sources told the Times.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson will launch a four-year emergency plan to tackle the looming illiteracy crisis, the Times reported on Sunday. The problem appears to be so dire it has become the prime minister’s second priority after the vaccination campaign, and will remain in the government’s focus until at least the next election, according to senior government sources and internal data seen by the paper.

The series of lockdowns implemented to stem the spread of Covid-19 apparently took a toll on the nation’s education, as more than 200,000 children who are about to move from primary to secondary schools are facing reading challenges. According to government figures, the number of students struggling with reading has risen by at least 30,000 over the past year.

A report by the children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, showed that on average each student lost roughly 19 weeks of in-person schooling over the course of the pandemic until March 8. “We asked children to make a huge sacrifice to help control the virus and now we need to give them something back,” de Souza said as she called for a “supercharged educational catch-up.”

Johnson himself already expressed concern over the growing education crisis at a press conference on March 23. “It’s the loss of learning for so many children and young people that’s the thing we’ve got to focus on now as a society,” he said at that time. The prime minister also called education his “legacy issue.”

The only thing I can think of is putting computer chips in their brains and wiring information from Wikipedia directly into their neurons.

But is there really any reason they would need to read? Can’t they just learn from right-wing podcasts like everyone else learns everything? I mean, they still understand spoken words, right?

(It should be noted that this same thing is going to be true in any country that did a children’s lockdown. As far as I know, it was only really the UK and some parts of the US that did that. The other countries, even in a hard lockdown, let children go to school, because even the high priests of science said that was okay.)