It’s back-to-school season and across the US, the aroma of freshly sharpened pencils, pumpkin spice everything, and ultra-processed pizza lunches is in the air.

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Sure, the Department of Education might be hanging on by a thread and teenagers keep buying walkie-talkies to circumvent cellphone bans. And the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the most comprehensive evaluation of US students, indicate that the reading skills of 12th graders are the worst they have been in three decades. But, by and large, the kids are back in class.

That’s not something we should take for granted.

Over 270 million children around the world today — including a staggering one in 10 young kids and over a quarter of teens........

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