Covid-19 has caused schools closures in 190 countries around the World. 1.5 billion children and young people, representing 90% of the world’s student population, remained at home. There is no doubt that these closures were necessary and contributed greatly to containing the contagion and defeating the first – and hopefully the only – wave of the epidemic. However, the social cost was very high, for the pupils and their families. And also the economic cost, apparently zero (the students do not produce Gross Domestic Product), will have to be measured in the medium – long term, in terms of learning gaps and therefore of capability gaps, especially for the students of the terminal classes and the university.

There are some lessons to be drawn from this new experience. The first one concerns the extraordinary importance of the school for all contemporary societies. As always, we realize how important is something we take for granted, such as air or water, only when we miss it. And as UNESCO stated, the pandemic is also a “serious educational crisis”; school closures have in fact represented “an unprecedented risk for the education, protection and well-being of children. Schools are not just places of learning: they provide social protection, nutrition, health and emotional support“.

The second lesson concerns distance learning; it was essential to adopt it in order not to reset the teaching activity to zero, but it also revealed all its limits. From the pedagogical and didactic point of view, it is clear that E-education can integrate and strengthen, but cannot completely replace the school in presence, which is also made of human relations, sharing of physical spaces, workshops that cannot only be simulated by computer. And from the point of view of social equity, because not all pupils have been able to benefit equally, due to lack of devices, connections, and their teachers’ digital skills.