Page 37 - EducationWorld March 2022

Return to on-campus schooling after the world’s longest lockdown

der-provided and ill-administered government schools was trywide shutdown.
judged too huge. Therefore for purposes of parity, private In this connection, the country’s influential, educated
schools were also ordered to lock down. Evidence provided urban middle class is not blameless. Ill-informed and un-
in extenso by your editors testifying that schools in several aware of the response of other countries and expert do-
Western countries which were locked down in the immedi- mestic opinion on the issue — the vast majority doesn’t
ate aftermath of the pandemic were quickly reopened, cut read EducationWorld — they swallowed self-serving official
no ice. For instance, in France primary-secondaries were opinion on the dangers the virus posed to children. Simul-
shuttered for a mere 12 weeks during the past two years; in taneously they reposed too much faith in ICT technologies
the UK for 27 weeks; in Germany for 38 weeks and in Swe- proclaimed by newly-promoted edtech companies to de-
den, they didn’t shut at all. Even in the US, which was hard liver as good — and even better — curriculums and prima-
hit by the pandemic and suffered 9.3 lakh deaths, schools ry-secondary education to children learning from home.
were ordered to be shut down for an average 71 weeks and However, latterly several authoritative studies (Unicef’s
in China where the virus originated, for 27 weeks. It’s per- Education from Disruption to Discovery (2021) and of Azim
tinent to note that none of these countries reported a sig- Premji University) have reported that not only is online
nificant number of abnormal hospitalisations of children education not as effective as in-class, in-person learning,
or mortality due to Covid-19. but children also suffer loss of peer learning, socialisation
The only explanation for the exaggerated caution dis- skills, as also considerable psychological and mental dam-
played by the Centre and states in ordering the world’s most age when they are cooped up learning from home.
prolonged closure of education institutions is that politi- Unsurprisingly, edtech companies touting the advan-
cians and bureaucrats aka the neta-babu brotherhood, are tages of ICT-enabled home learning overlooked the reality
only too well aware of the infrastructure deficiencies and of the country’s dismal housing stock — under neta-babu
administrative lacunae of the country’s 1.2 million govern- socialism, en masse housing mortgage loans were permit-
ment schools. Such neglect makes observance of standard ted as late as mid-1990s. With the average Indian home
Covid safety protocols — distancing, hand-washing, toilet covering a floor area of only 494 sq. ft, children were at
hygiene — impossible in state schools. Therefore the coun- greater risk of contracting the virus at home than in school.

MARCH 2022 EDUCATIONWORLD 37