Impact of Pandemic on Education in India

 

By Stephen Lepcha

The coronavirus has delivered a devastating blow to the education system. Since schools and colleges are closed, the traditional way of offline schooling has been replaced by online classes. Although online classes save a lot of time, sometimes due to poor network connectivity and other technical problems it causes problems for both the teachers as well as the students. The classes are conducted through various meeting platforms like zoom, google meet, teachmint, etc.

The new system of learning has brought about a new wave to the technological sector in India. Students and teachers are being more efficient at utilizing technical resources. Students are taking keen interest in computer programming, video editing, photoshop, etc. This new system has been advantageous to the students in a lot of ways. Students are getting plenty of time to learn and explore new things, study new subjects, pursue their passion and to do many other things as well. But just like the saying ”Every coin has two sides”, the online learning process has its disadvantages as well.

Learning less will have a cascading effect on an entire generation of students. Even with the best resources, remote learning with digital aid has been less effective than classroom learning. Teachers are convinced that remote learning cannot mirror traditional school-based learning. According to the UNICEF-IT4 report, this was the largest mass disruption in education in modern history and has affected 1.6 billion children globally. Some Indian states are beginning to acknowledge that physical classes for primary and middle school has to resume without further delay because learning gaps may be impossible to reverse, causing higher dropout rates and concomitant social problems, including youth violence .

According to the 2017-18 data, boys in villages drop out of school because of two factors: (1) Financial constraints in their families and (2) Economic work. After school reopens, children of grass root level will not go back to school rather they will be pushed into child labour. If this loss in learning is not compensated , it will have a domino effect on the future learning of children as they are promoted to higher grades without doing their hand written exams. Importantly during this pandemic, teachers are unable to build emotional connection with the children and carry out meaningful assessments of their learning abilities. The vast differences before the pandemic and after is, the amount of sincere hard work put in exams by the students.

Online classes has also hampered the students coming from rural background immensely. For instance, in one of the cases, a student committed suicide. In this particular case, the student was studying in Class 9 and could not access a smartphone, she was unable to attend online classes due to which she committed suicide. The new system of learning has changed the lifestyle of students as well as teachers and parents respectively. The particular mode of online teaching is just favouring those students with a high level of internet and wifi, which is supposed to be the greatest inequality. Different kinds of questions and thoughts are killing all the students emotionally, because they are aware that this system of learning during this pandemic will no longer be healthy for their knowledge. It further deteriorates the mental health of students leading to stress and anxiety. Therefore, this has become a matter of grave concern which needs to be addressed immediately.

Lastly, most of the students, teachers, parents have voiced their opinions in favour of reopening all the educational institutes, schools and colleges as soon as possible. There is no dearth of anecdotal evidence that parents and children themselves have repeatedly expressed their fascinating feelings and desire to have schools and colleges to be re-opened.