With the outbreak of the pandemic, the last one year has been full of difficulties, challenges; and a sense of constant conundrum has prevailed over all aspects of life and the education sector and the process of training and learning has been worst-hit. The sudden and unprecedented interruption in the process of learning which starts from home through the playgrounds to the classrooms has caused irreparable loss and damage to the child and the adolescent academically, psychologically and emotionally.
When it is about learning, each year is important and more important is the sense of certainty and security that shall in return cater to the need of having a lot of hopes and dreams about life and the quintessential ability in the child to paint those dreams through activities, without which learning shall be nothing but a monotonous gathering of information and which shall ultimately lead to the despair that the present examination pattern shall bring. The sudden spike in Covid-19 numbers and the subsequent anxiety has also led to a lot of hue and cry and public outrage about Class-X Board examinations and Class-XII Board, which saw a chain of activities like signature campaigns, PILs leading to the cancellation of the former and postponement of the later, which again faced protests.
Our education system so far has not been independent of the brick-cement structure of institutions; and the shutdown of schools coupled with cancellations and postponements of examinations is enough to jeopardise the learning process and the future of the students.
It is not that just the 25,000 schools affiliated to the CBSE are affected by the shutdowns and postponements of examinations, but it is having its impact on more than 1.5 million schools across the nation. The interruption in the process of training and learning has most adversely affected the students from the marginalised and vulnerable strata of the society.
With educational institutions largely depending on technology for conducting online classes and examination, millions of those who don’t have access to internet connectivity, mobile phones or computers have been pushed to the brink of backwardness and the gap between the rich and poor, the marginalised and those in upper social ladder on the academic or educational indicators have further increased, which no reservation in education or job can even be adequate enough to compensate. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to ensure that adequate resources are made available to students from impoverished backgrounds so as to enable them to participate in virtual classes and appear in online examinations, which also includes devising a system to ensure mentoring at personal level by teachers or roping-in part-time mentors from among college students in lieu of a descent honorarium.
However, having said that, it is important to understand that virtual learning cannot be the sole means of teaching forever as it can only be a medium of just dissemination of information and can never be the way for actual teaching or learning; but yes, it can be an additional and significant part of the process of teaching and learning. Especially for school children, playground is as much important as classroom teaching and painting is as much important as dancing, sports or those many avenues of the so called extracurricular activities, without which the process of learning shall be incomplete.
There has been a lot of attempts to recalibrate and change the educational system but never was there such a chance before to imagine the worse of the bottlenecks that educational system and process of learning could face like that of now.
Apart from this, it cannot be said with certainty that the situation would change by next year or a worse situation might not arise in the future. Therefore, simple cancellation or postponement of examination is not the answer to the crisis that we are facing with now. We need to rethink, restructure and go for a significant revamp of the entire education system. It should now be ensured that more learning is actually what we aim for, more than just teaching and we should prepare students for being more enabled to swiftly and efficiently take over and carryout the vocation or field of work they choose and be better humans than learning to just pass the examinations.
Hence, a different system of assessment should be designed, that will check on the parameters of creativity and ability to handle things pragmatically in real life situations and shall enable the students to meaningfully contribute in the various walks of national life.
We need to revisit the National Education Policy and design an education system and a pattern of assessment that shall bring out the best in each and every one and optimise the human ability to be a good human being who shall help in creation of a harmonious society thriving on the virtues of ‘compassion’ and not just ‘development’, ‘scientific temper and wisdom’ and not just ‘knowledge’. It is time, that we stop adding to the pool of fools and remember what Albert Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
(The writer is a lawyer and public policy expert and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Media Studies at School of Mass Communication, KIIT University. He can be reached at sjyotiranjan3@gmail.com)