Europe | A tale of two colleges

Covid-19 school closures are widening Europe’s class divisions

And it will only get worse

|AMSTERDAM

NO ONE IS ever truly ready for lockdown. But when the Netherlands closed its schools in December, the Herman Wesselink College, a high school in a well-off suburb of Amsterdam, was readier than most. About half its students have parents who completed higher education. Nearly all have their own bedroom to study in. The school has given its pupils laptops for years, and during the first lockdown last spring switched smoothly to remote learning. The director says students have not fallen behind a whit in terms of content, though their study skills have languished.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “A tale of two colleges”

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