OPINION: Canadian's Nobel Peace Prize nod serves up lessons for world
The lessons of Dr. Irvin Studin’s work is that we ought never again to close the schools as we did in the pandemic
Article content
The Canadian public intellectual Dr. Irvin Studin has been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
Studin would be the first Canadian to win the Nobel Peace Prize since Lester B. Pearson in 1957, should the nomination be successful later this year.
Recommended Videos
tap here to see other videos from our team.
OPINION: Canadian's Nobel Peace Prize nod serves up lessons for world Back to video
tap here to see other videos from our team.
More important than this historic nomination is, of course, the major issue for humanity that Studin was able to bring to the fore in Canada and globally coming out of the crippling COVID pandemic period.
Studin was the seminal figure to identify what may well turn out to be the greatest human catastrophe of the pandemic and post-pandemic periods – the ouster and defection of hundreds of millions of children, of all ages and backgrounds, permanently, from all forms of schooling in the wake of the pandemic school closures of 2020-22.
Early on in the haze of the pandemic period, Studin began to see clearly and understand that, while Canada and the world imagined that all children were continuing normal education during the school closures, far too many were in fact disappearing from schooling altogether. In short, these kids never returned to school even after the schools reopened.
Studin coined the term “third bucket kids” to describe what was happening on the ground, at scale: Kids that were altogether not in any type of school at all – full stop.
Studin calculated that well over 100,000 Canadian children, white-collar and blue-collar alike, were ousted from all schooling, permanently, during the pandemic closures. This calamity was led by Ontario, which had the longest school closures in the country and houses the largest student population.
He and his colleagues estimated that, at the height of the pandemic closures, over half a billion students worldwide – the size of the European Union – had been ousted from all forms of schooling. In effect, a significant number from a generation of children – humanity’s greatest resource – was immediately placed at a crippling disadvantage in an ever-unforgiving, ruthless and competitive world!
To be sure, this is a catastrophe not only for Canada’s youth, but also for the future of the country, as this newly heavily undereducated and undersocialized cohort (Canada’s third bucket kids) will bleed into every corner of Canadian state and society tomorrow and for the balance of the century: The national workforce, the social fabric (witness the recent dramatic increases in youth crime and violence), and the country’s institutions.
As for the world, the sudden emergence of hundreds of millions of patently uneducated youth will have major consequences for regional, international, intra- and inter-state stability in the coming decades.
Uganda, for instance, lost well over a quarter of its national student body due to the school closures, while India lost nearly 100 million students! These are vast scales of future destabilization.
How could this happen? A continent-sized underclass was instantly created through one of the gravest errors of human policy and judgment of the early 21st century!
As it turns out, as soon as a school shutters beyond a moment, children without Internet access disappear from schooling fast, often never again to return. Internet access in Canada during the pandemic was high but far from total, while countries in South Asia or parts of Africa and Latin America had less than 20% coverage.
But even with attempts at large-scale online schooling during the pandemic, children in abusive homes, children with disabilities and special needs, children with linguistic deficiencies, and children in precarious financial circumstances were at growing risk of permanent school defection with every additional day of school closure.
To add insult to injury, the prolonged absence of physical school triggered other calculations for families in many societies: Girls were married off early, and boys and girls alike went off to full-time work at all ages while abandoning school.
For many teenagers, online school for sustained periods stripped education of most of the meaning previously associated with physical school – friends, sports and music, mentors and a sense of community. Millions of adolescents around the world, and thousands across Canada, defected early as a consequence. These teenagers (now young adults) will typically be deprived of years of well-being and life expectancy.
By late 2020, Studin had begun to mobilize policy and education leaders across nearly 60 countries to diagnose and begin to reckon with this catastrophe. He created the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic), a pioneering initiative across all continents to bring attention to the third-bucket crisis, reopen the schools, and find and reintegrate the hundreds of millions of ousted children into education.
With resolve and determination, he met and briefed political leaders in countries around the world to explain the complex genesis and mechanics of the third bucket phenomenon, and why this catastrophe should never again be repeated. He intervened publicly to explain the vast scale and long tentacles of the catastrophe at hand – effectively, that hundreds of millions of children suddenly ousted from all schooling could only foretell mass societal destabilization and misery.
In Ontario, he launched Project Youth Energy, the first-ever on-the-ground endeavour to find and reintegrate into education Ontario’s third-bucket children. The project was led by Liz Galvin, whose daughter died by suicide at her university during the pandemic closures.
The lessons of Studin’s work, and that of his distinguished colleagues on the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic), is that we ought never again to close the schools. This great lesson turns on two capital considerations: First, Studin and his colleagues have proven that the consequences of school closures are unacceptably and irrecoverably vast for humankind; and second, humanity must mobilize all of its creative energies to divine new way to continue effective and uninterrupted education even when there are emergencies.
“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth,” said the Greek philosopher Diogenes in 4th century BC. We couldn’t agree more. There will again be emergencies of national and international consequence in Canada and across the world, but we cannot permit ourselves to destroy our youth and their future – indeed, our collective future – with each ensuing force majeure.
We must learn from these past mistakes so as not to repeat them.
— Sam Sasan Shoamanesh is the VP of The Institute for 21stCentury Questions.
— Kwadwo Kyeremanteng is the Head of Critical Care at the The Ottawa Hospital.
— Sudarshan Ramaswamy is the Dean of the School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University in New Delhi, India, and a member of the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic).
— Nancy Rousseau is the Principal of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, USA, and a member of the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic).
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.