As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, closure of schools remains one of the most visible means of far reaching impact on young people. According to UNESCO, the education of nearly 1.6 billion pupils in 190 countries has so far been affected — that’s 90% of the world’s school-age children. Never before have so many children been out of school at the same time, disrupting learning and upending lives, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized and the poorest being the hardest hit by the pandemic. Lockdowns are expected to widen the existing inequalities across the globe, with repercussions for years to come.
Impact on the Young
A whole host of issues have impacted children beyond the loss of learning. Time out of school means lesser social interaction with peers, lack of a conducive learning environment at home, dropping out of school due to financial constraints or migration, and no access to mid-day meals for many. Children are struggling to take care of themselves. They are now struggling to make meaning of the world around them and they are witnessing their families struggle to survive. The pandemic has further pushed young people from marginalized backgrounds to the margins and impacted their sense of dignity. The gains of education over the last few decades have potentially been lost.
From missed opportunities for learning from an emotional, intellectual and social development perspective, to widening inequalities, digital divide, and bringing to light issues of abuse, depression, child marriage, and child labour, the impact has been immense. Young people face high uncertainty about exams, schools, anxiety about friendship, and play. Many are sad and frustrated. Many of them miss attending school as well, while some enjoy the videos, they miss their teacher and classmates and having that shared experience.
Ranging from indescribable stress to anxiety to boredom and apathy, the deep impact on psychological safety as a result of the economic uncertainty faced by families is now a daily experience. Children may not be putting words to these feelings but it will have shown in their body building muscle memory of trauma.
For many, teaching and learning have come to a total halt owing to lack of access to devices & the internet. For others, even though access to devices may not be a problem, using it to learn continues to be a problem, as the whole family may be dependent on just 1 device. Rudimentary models of online education have also revealed the massive digital divide in our country which has, in the wake of the pandemic, also become a question of access. Students taking online schools/classes say that they spend a lot more time now than before doing work assigned to them from school without the perks of school which involves being with friends and engaging in extracurricular activities and personal development activities. Also because of a lack of connection with teachers and school or the outside world, few older students have started working and some are planning to drop-out of schools to help their families.
Impact on the education ecosystem
A lot of Budget Private schools are struggling financially and most of them on an average, have 30% to 70% of their fees since March 2020 pending with no possibility of getting it in the next two-three months. Parents are in fact considering 2020 a drop year for their kids. It has caught the education system completely unprepared. The system is rooted in schools being the space for learning and doesn’t operate on very high trust and agency. Now, with no physical supervision on children, many teachers, and school leaders are feeling lost. The system of getting all children to consume the same information, at the same time, in the same way, is falling apart. While the pandemic has on one hand pushed schools to undertake major health adaptations, it has also pushed a wide variety of important organizational changes that will remain and pursue personalization and equity. It has pushed many of us to think beyond the normal and it has also opened doors for new conversations.
The pandemic has catalysed a change that has just been an idea for very many years. Online education, blended learning, flip classrooms, and many more and has most definitely opened unimaginable possibilities to bridge the education divide. However, these possibilities come hand in hand with their challenges as well. While this disruption has accelerated innovation and adaptation in education tech among students, it is currently less than 30% of the student population. There is a definite need for collaborations to establish a ground-level innovation to enable seamless offline teaching. The digitalization of education systems has taken a big leap forward due to Covid19, but a large number of young people in the country do not have access to devices or the internet. Teaching and learning in the online modes in the school education context is a completely new skill for many. We are witnessing a large scale behavioural change that needs to happen in tandem with skill development among teachers and children to make blended learning possible. Adapting to online education is tougher for students speaking in vernacular languages because most digital tools and content are currently available only in English. Very few ed-tech firms provide vernacular content. We are now living through the greatest educational experiment in the history of humankind — 1.2 Billion kids moving to online in just 6 weeks. It proves that massive change in education is possible and that it can be done fast. This experiment also proves that the idea of digital education must be revisited. While existing Ed-tech may not be ideal for student & teacher wellbeing, there is a need for human-centered & empowering ed-tech.
Systemic issues in education
Responses to the COVID-19 crisis will vary depending on every education system’s capacity. In particular, they will depend on whether governments have robust emergency preparedness plans in place, whether technology is already fully embedded in the system, on internet availability within communities, availability of hard copies of learning material, and ensuring adequate working conditions for teachers and education staff. Our response is likely to expose deep education inequalities, including within a country’s education system. Furthermore the adaptability and flexibility of the existing system will certainly be questioned. In fact, the relevance of the education system as it stands today will again be questioned in terms of content relevance and mode of delivery. The current education system has not been designed acknowledging the entirety of a child’s experience growing up in poverty. There is just a hard push for results, expecting children to work harder because there’s no other way. Every child is taught the same way and then we wonder why every child doesn’t learn as much or as fast.
There is a lot of focus on what to teach and never challenging how it is being taught. There needs to be more emphasis on rethinking the methods that are currently being used. The current systems are driven to teach what we think students need to know, and in the process, not emphasizing the need for them to know themselves, to understand themselves, and focus on their well-being.
One of the biggest failures is how unprepared young people are to manage change and lead their own learning. The neglect of wellbeing and lifeskills and overemphasis on academic outcomes and job skills have left our youth completely unprepared.
Books and education are also not included in ‘essential services’ which show the lack of importance the system puts on learning. When we speak of disaster management, we don’t address the need for an education emergency response. How does one plan to advance the right to education in times of uncertainty or when times are unstable? It also laid bare how as a nation we were not equipped and possibly still are not ready to ensure that when disaster strikes, all of our students have the chance to ensure that their learning goes on uninterrupted.
All governments should learn from this experience, and strengthen their education systems to withstand future crises, whether from disease, armed conflict, or climate change. This pandemic has shown that few governments have invested in their education emergency response, or have tested their capacity to manage disasters’ knock-on effects on education. Given the expectation of further shocks, this is not just desirable, but an imperative to protect children and youth’s right to education during unstable times.
Response to the current crisis to support education ecosystems
First and foremost, staying in touch with students through whichever medium possible and listening to them. Organizations are exploring blended learning as a means of ensuring that the teaching continues with the learning process as the schools stay shut. Blended learning and virtual space are potential equalizers to bring opportunities to children. The challenges of access to devices and the internet persist, but education focussed NGOs are taking it up as their responsibility to take up this challenge and to never cease to innovate and reach out to every single child, with the most important focus being that we are there for the children.
Schools are learning how to hold effective spaces online, how to work more closely with parents, how physical world principles of learning, culture, and engagement translate in the virtual world. The role of the relationship between teachers and students is more pronounced than ever. Slowly but steadily organizations are also bringing school leaders and teachers online, working with them to understand what would work in their contexts. The challenges are complex. Children accessing phones, for instance, when working adults own the device. Therefore, the role of trust is huge, parents need to trust their children with devices, teachers need to trust their students to own their learning. Parents and teachers need to trust each other to work towards common goals. It takes skill and practice and time to build this trust.
Our moment in history to reimagine the future of education
For a while now, educators around the world have been talking about the need to rethink how we educate future generations. This might just be the disruption that the sector needed to get us all to rethink how we educate, and question what we need to teach and what we are preparing our students for. So, as we educators grapple with new ways of communicating with our students away from our classrooms and lecture halls, it is a good time to reflect on how this disruptive crisis can help us define what learning should look like for Generations Z, Alpha and beyond.
If to slow down means to re-energize and taking a pause means to reflect and reimagining means to take every child along, then indeed there is a need to slow down, pause and reimagine. It is definitely time to focus on approaches that take every child along. This is the time to change not because of the pandemic but because of the need to improve and thrive as individuals, communities, and planet. So, it is time to pause but above all to experiment with new forms of collective organization and action. The opportunities are immense. Home and family are now the child’s school. There is an opportunity to embed these in education — empathy, culture, and history and to rewrite children’s relationship with nature. We need to find pockets of taking a breath and being still, as a way to re-fuel our energy to address the crisis through all ways possible — donating, fieldwork, policy response, and programmatic action.
There is a need to move away from the individual to the collective, from distinct disciplines of history, geography, biology, etc to interconnected integrated domains. The need for policy changes to foster universal accessibility and reform governance architecture within the departments.
A pause is a necessary segue to re-imagination lest the action limits to being a reaction. In fact, truth be told, most policy changes have been reactions, not re-imaginations.The world, over the pandemic, has shown us the harsh truth of social injustice. Only when we pause can we see clearly the magnitude of chaos that surrounds us today. It is our moral responsibility to be still and accept the despair we live in today. Then we create a new normal. Slowing down is optional, but the world must definitely pause (before we react) to allow for new possibilities to emerge for the future of education.
Our collective response to transform education for all in a post-COVID world
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed vulnerabilities; it has also surfaced extraordinary human resourcefulness and potential. Decisions made today will have long-term consequences for the future of education. Choices must be based on a humanistic vision of education and development, and human rights. COVID-19 presents a real challenge and real responsibility. Our ideas must invite debate, engagement, and action by governments, international organizations, civil society, educational professionals, as well as learners and stakeholders at all levels.
First and foremost, Be there for the children come what may. Create those proof points of what is tagged as impossible. We must allow children’s voices to told and guide us towards identifying limitations within Educational systems. It is their voices and stories that need to be in the forefront, by asking them what they think the ultimate purpose of their education should be.
Use design thinking principles & ask students to co-create innovations: not only will they be more powerful but also involve experiential learning and then learn-unlearn-relearn as organizations, individuals, and responsible members of the society.
Once schools reopen, we must acknowledge that students could have possibly undergone a traumatic period of change, stress, and anxiety & that the pandemic has affected their well-being & it is this that must be addressed first, their complete wellbeing.
Collaboration is the key. Amplifying the potential of learning ecosystems locally & globally. Learning to use the potential of digital-based learning & blend it with human-focused & nature-based learning. Increasing awareness of funders & policymakers about the change necessary. Catalysing social movements — of students, teachers, parents, city activists. Working at every scale of the learning ecosystem. Collective action & systemic change by bringing in student, parent, community, teacher, school leader & many more voices. Move beyond transactional collaborations & conversations.
Finally and most importantly lets begin by asking students, parents and communities: #WhatIf you could redesign the education system?
(Article curated by Rakshan Kalmady drawn from the conversation on July 15th 2020, a Twitter Chat titled Reimagining Educational Ecosystems: Challenges and Opportunities. We thank all the participants of the Twitter Chat)
Contributors– Dakshinamoorthy Visweswaran, Romana Shaikh, Simple Education Foundation, Tulika Verma, Jordi Díaz Gibson, Pinky Chandran, Apoorv, Pukhraj Ranjan, Siddesh Sarma, Srishti Paliwal, Rohit Kumar, Gouri L, Tejas Mahajan, Slam Out Loud, Neha Raheel, Reap Benefit, Pavel Luksha, Sudhir Nayar, Renske van Grinsven, Siddesh Sarma, Pukhraj Ranjan, Louka Parry, Radio Active 90.4MHz, Shambhavi Sharma, Madhukar Banuri, Leadership For Equity, Sajitha, Suchetha Bhat & Vishal Talreja.