HENA Khan, a ninth grader in Dhaka, Bangladesh, struggled to focus on her studies this week, complaining of the heat as temperatures in the capital exceeded 40 degrees Celsius.
“There is no real education at school in hot weather like this,” he said.
“Teachers can’t teach, students can’t concentrate. On the contrary, our lives are in danger,” he said.
Hena is one of more than 40 million students who have been absent from classrooms in recent weeks as a heatwave forced school closures in parts of Asia and North Africa.
When the climate warms due to the burning of fossil fuels, heat waves last longer and peak as average temperatures rise.
In turn, government authorities and public health experts around the world are pondering whether to let students study in hot classrooms, or ask them to stay home and stay cool.
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Any decision has consequences. According to UN data, around 17% of the world’s school-age children are out of school, but the proportion is much greater in developing countries, with almost a third of children in Sub-Saharan Africa out of school compared with just 3% of children school age in North America.
Children’s test scores in developing countries also lag far behind those in developed countries.
“Heat could make matters worse, widening the learning gap between tropical developing countries and developed countries,” experts said
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But sending children to school where the temperature is too hot can make them sick.
South Sudan in 2024 already closed schools for around 2.2 million students at the end of March when temperatures soared to 45 degrees Celsius. Thousands of schools in the Philippines and India also did the same at the end of April.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh continues to vacillate between opening and closing schools for some 33 million students amid pressure to prepare students for exams. Even when temperatures rise to dangerous levels.
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“Many schools in the country don’t have fans, are poorly ventilated, and may have tin roofs that don’t provide good insulation,” said Shumon Sengupta, Bangladesh director of the nonprofit Save the Children.
On April 29, one day after reopening schools that had been closed the previous week due to the heat, Bangladeshi authorities again closed all primary schools and educational institutions in almost half of the districts as temperatures reached 43 degrees Celsius.
High temperature
Even if students continue to attend classes during a heat wave, their education will likely still be disrupted.
High temperatures slow down the brain’s cognitive function, reducing a student’s ability to store and process information.
A May 2020 study found that high school students in the United States did worse on standardized tests if they were exposed to higher temperatures in the year leading up to the exams.
Research published in the American Economic Journal found that warmer school year temperatures of 0.55 degrees Celsius reduced learning that year by 1%.
“Most of the impact disappeared in schools that had air conditioning,” said study co-author Josh Goodman, an economist at Boston University.
According to various surveys, between 40% and 60% of US schools are estimated to have at least some air conditioning.
Schools that lack such education are usually found in low-income areas that already lag behind wealthier areas academically.
In the United States, the average performance of the lowest-income students is about four years behind that of the highest-income students, according to a 2019 study in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Goodman and his colleagues found similar learning patterns when they looked at standardized test data in other countries.
“When (students in) these places have a hotter year, they seem to learn less,” he said.
This is worrying, Goodman added, because as global warming continues, countries transitioning to very hot climates will suffer more than countries in temperate climates.
“Climate change will widen the learning gap between hot and cold countries,” Goodman said.
Several studies show that excessive heat in tropical areas can impact a child’s education even before birth.
Children in Southeast Asia who were exposed to higher-than-average temperatures in the womb and early in life got fewer years of schooling later in life, a 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found.
Because many people in the region depend on agriculture, high temperatures could disrupt food production and household incomes, said study author Heather Randell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.
“If the plants are damaged by heat, the young may not get enough food which can hinder their development,” he said.
Likewise, a family may no longer be able to afford school fees, or may pull the children out of school to help on the farm.
School rules
The number of school days off due to extreme heat continues to rise in the US, but few states track the data.
“U.S. schools now cancel classes on an average of six to seven days of school each year due to hot weather, compared with about three to four days a decade ago,” said Paul Chinowsky, a civil engineer who led a 2021 study of schools and rising temperatures for the company Resilient Analytics, which provides consulting for governments and non-governmental organizations.
“In Bangladesh, last year, schools were closed for six to seven days,” said Sengupta of Save the Children.
“But this year, they said it might be closed for three to four weeks,” he said.
May is generally the hottest month of the year in South Asia.
More closures worry him, Sengupta said. When children are out of school, they are more vulnerable to child labor and child marriage, according to NGO reports.
Bangladesh Education Minister Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury said on April 30 that schools would remain open on weekends if necessary to complete the curriculum.
“The decision to close schools is no longer a national direction but must be taken at the district level,” he concluded. (straitstimes/fer/Z-7)
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