COVID 19 is indeed an opportunity to stem the rot - Impact of Lockdown on education Part 1

By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

When COVID 19 triggered a Lockdown, Work From Home (WFH) in the field of education assumed the avatar of distance or e learning. Distance learning is nothing new in India atleast.

There have been televised classrooms on the state broadcaster, as well as on You Tube among other experiments but a total absence from classrooms for both teachers and students courtesy a Pandemic was something new.

The Lockdown was announced even when final exams were being held. Exams were postponed, some indefinitely so and in the state of Telangana in south India, the 10th standard board exams (where students get school leaving certificates) the final exams scheduled, and some already underway for March – April 2020 were cancelled giving them promotion pro bono en masse!  That the absence of examinations emphasizes children’s aptitude and moulding of talent is lost on the education system followed in India anyway.

But teaching in front of the web camera is not quite as simple as putting together the telecom infrastructure for teaching. A whole lot of things need to be in place for e learning to be effective.

Teachers – trained to impart education live in a school with classrooms within the syllabus were suddenly exposed to internet based teaching modules. The teachers could not see the students and did not know if the students were paying attention to the teaching, or if someone was imposting in the place of the student(s). Suddenly teachers found themselves accused by parents for mis-pronunciation, or giving misinformation among other things.

For the students, the sense of competition was completely lost in distance learning. Differently-abled children need an integrated education to be able to benefit from the letter and spirit of education.

Budget allocations made by the state governments for toilet cleansing agents, clothes for poor students, nutritive snacks and soups are invariably misappropriated or returned to government departments for not being utilised.

What about rural internet connectivity? India’s internet connectivity / internet penetration is a paltry 34.45 million users Percentage of Individuals using the Internet out of a population of 1.3 billion. Even government schools or rural offices lack reliable internet connections. Successive governments have not been able to stymie corruption in schools where teachers sign in the attendance registers but are never there to teach children.

No government – state or central has been able to take action against errant teachers who sign the attendance registers, take home their pay, but never do their duty as appointed teachers. “Distance learning or internet based teaching will make mongrels of such scoundrels” says a retired school principal who dedicated her life as a teacher to teaching the Hearing impaired in Bangalore, and for obvious reasons prefers to stay anonymous.

 “When such is the case how can there be two types of internet based distance learning?” That would be utterly unfair to rural students says a scorning 22 year old Sangeetha (name changed to protect her identity and privacy) from Sirsi Taluq in Uttar Kannada District of Karnataka who had to drop out of school because of poverty and she now works as a domestic maid in Bangalore.  

Becoming emotional, she says “It will be akin to permitting copying to urban students while rural students will be left begging for a teacher in school”. And then our lot … for want of an education some of us have to scrub vessels in some rich person’s house in Bangalore or Panaji in Goa where the master’s children are in our age bracket but they have the privilege of quality education while we” … she starts sobbing.

I had to stop taking notes to calm her.  Sangeeta’s case is particularly sensitive. She lost her mother at a very tender age of nine years. She was the eldest of four siblings when her Mother died in tragic circumstances. Her father remarried, and Sangeeta ended up being the slave for her step mother and four younger siblings. Then her step mother gave birth to another child at which point Sangeeta was asked to drop out of school to take up domestic responsibilities in her house. Gifted, talented ambitious, intelligent and bright, she had to silently forgo her ambitions, desires and dreams to bring money to her father who worked as a plantation worker just so that her siblings could get a better education than herself.

At 18 she was taken to a rich merchant’s house in Bangalore to work as a domestic help. At 19 she was married. But barely two years into marriage, her alcoholic husband died. He was barely 32 years himself.  Then Sangeeta was no longer welcome in her husband’s or parents’ house so she came back to her former employer’s house in Bangalore.  Such stories are legion across the subcontinent, indeed in South Asia.

Till absentee teachers are held accountable, indeed, till corruption goes out of the system no amount of reforms will make a difference to society much less trends like e learning / distance learning.

To be continued