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Ayear ago, most stakeholders in the education process were blindsided by the realization that closure of educational institutions were to be for an indefinite period. Accepting that education had to be carried out in the virtual medium, there was overnight a flood of online platforms catering to the newfound necessity of contacting the student community and keeping a semblance of education going under severe socio-economic conditions. The immediate crisis that came to the fore tore across the student community and the proverbial divide between the haves and have-nots was put into the sharpest focus, unseen across generations.

Dependence on the internet and suitable and expensive mobility equipment immediately threw almost half of the nations student population out of the educational system. Compounded by the fact that sudden closure of establishments rendered millions without the basic necessities of existence, it was a foregone conclusion that poverty would push another 30 per cent of the student population out of the reach of educational institutions. Effectively, within a month, the active student population of the country shrunk by 80 per cent and by June 2020 it was a foregone conclusion that most of the dropouts would be unable to return to the fold in the near future.

For a country whose policy makers and stakeholders had been exerting themselves continuously to bring down student drop-outs to single digit percentages, the sudden turn of events annulled decades of painstaking reach-out to bring in inclusive education across the country. Also, the sudden closure of educational institutions and the consequent mass dropouts across the country rendered the newly framed National Educational Policy practically infructuous in the short and medium run. The crisis is not limited to our country with UNESCO figures claiming a total drop-out number of 1.6 billion children on a modest estimate.

Such dropout figures are not limited to south Asia or sub-Saharan Africa but encompass countries as diverse and advanced as the middle-income economies of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Spain and Portugal. Clearly, Covids impact on education is not merely universal but is also incomprehensible in its extent, range and depth. In order to frame recovery policies, comprehensive data-mining efforts have been planned and are under various stages of implementation. The chief among them is the UNESCO-UNICEFWorld Bank joint survey on National Educational Response to Covid-19 School Closures and the Covid-19 Global Educational Recovery Tracker, a new tool developed in partnership by Johns Hopkins Universitys e-School+ Initiative, UNICEF and the World Bank.

The primary focus of this global outreach is to monitor school reopening and aid recovery planning efforts in more than 200 countries and territories. Initial data, as of April 2021 reveal that more than 168 million children globally have been shut out of any form of in-person learning for almost an entire year. Alarmingly, this figure does not include the children who have dropped out of school entirely as a result of the pandemic. Covid-induced educational disruptions in India are increasingly bringing out other equally serious manifestations of the harm inflicted by the pandemic on education.

While active involvement of the mobile service providers and equipment manufacturers for communication devices have mitigated the hardship to the student community to a large extent by increasing the coverage of mobile services and availability of cheaper equipment, it is increasingly becoming clear that education and assessment in the virtual medium are exposing their own patterns of disruptions, most of which threaten to expand to life-long cognitive debilities.

In the Indian context, the greatest challenge to education has come from the exclusive but unavoidable reliance on the virtual medium. While personal proximities and close physical monitoring of progress has been the hallmark of our education from time immemorial, virtual teaching has significantly eroded the role of the teaching community from exercising effective control of their instructions, with most teachers still struggling to know the number of students actively participating in the virtual instruction. The scenario with online examinations and evaluation is more precarious.

While we have adopted a blended evaluation mode, closely resembling the western concept of the open-book examination, it is commonly seen that the evaluation has reduced itself to students copying answers at home from books or the web and transferring them to institutions for evaluation. Needless to say, they end up with marks which are at the upper end of the spectrum. Clearly, such evaluation and the inflated marks they carry are not only poor indicators of student proficiency, but may actually turn counterproductive for such students in the long run with the stigma of having been evaluated under such farcical circumstances sticking to them before future employers and institutional job providers.

This is compounded by the huge cognitive and academic deficiencies that the student community is facing with most stakeholders agreeing that effective online instruction is easier said than done. The challenge to the teaching community is no less profound. Within the space of a year, teachers have been burdened not only with managing online classes and evaluation but are constantly weighted down by a constant stream of online teaching products competing for their attention, most being repetitive applications and redundant online methodologies.

Such inane teaching technologies have significantly diverted the energy of the teaching and educational administrative community; such energy could have been better used in augmenting effective instructional and evaluation efforts. Under such challenging circumstances, the need of the hour is to garner a talent pool of stakeholders to steer education at such a critical time. Clearly, conventional policy bureaucratese would serve little purpose. Also, Indian educational contexts and conditions are radically different from international scenarios and we would not have the luxury of adopting foreign strategies which would face strong headwinds in micro-level educational contexts in our country.

Mitigating the severe setback to education and rehabilitating the compromised education of millions of students across the country through appropriate remedies are the only ways in which damage to our student community can be minimized. A year into the pandemic and the long-term impact on education is already threatening an entire generation of our youth through poor skill attainment and compromised instruction. This shall directly impact their ability to attain proficiencies for employability. The talent pool bottleneck this crisis shall create would threaten and choke the services and manufacturing sectors in the long run, thereby impacting the economy as a whole. The earlier this long-term danger is understood and addressed, the better it would be for our community.

(The writer is Assistant Professor of English, Pratilata Waddedar Mahavidyalaya, West Bengal)

Excerpt from:

Challenge to education - The Statesman