India, March 7 -- More children own a smartphone. More children are lonely. Most children know what it's like to leave school one day, and not go back for years.

When the world looks back on how the years of the pandemic affected education, there will inevitably be stories of anxious teens, isolated toddlers and frantic parents (how to minimise screen time; how to juggle it all; how to teach caring and sharing in the absence of peers?) woven into the tale.

The truth is, all children slipped into lives that were somehow poorer.

What two years of your childhood would you choose to delete?

The earliest ones, in the hopes you wouldn't remember, and could make up for the formative loss somehow? The early years of uniformed school, with the...