Ukrainian pupils face an impossible dilemma

Today, almost five million Ukrainian pupils have gone to school – in person or remotely. Most didn’t have festive assemblies with flowers, songs and first graders reciting poems by heart, as they would have done before the war. The first of September doesn’t feel like a day to celebrate anymore. Today, every third child in Ukraine stayed at home – schools that could not build bomb shelters or are in the 60-mile danger zone from the frontline have not been allowed to reopen. These precautions are in place as gatherings of Ukrainians, even children, can attract Russian missiles and drones. Lockdown demonstrated, starkly, the detrimental effects of ‘home learning’. Screens are no substitute for classrooms. Education has become a casualty of war.

My eight-year-old brother is one of those trying to study offline. But the dilemma for parents is acute: what if the school is struck by a Russian missile? The authorities claim that 84 per cent of schools have equipped shelters, a basic requirement to reopen classrooms.