Chinks in the armour

The Covid crisis has revealed many shortcomings in India's school education system

Every year as March approaches, dread, anticipation, tension, anxiety and even excitement build up as students across India sit for their board examinations, a larger-than-life test that shapes their future more than it ought to.

The anticlimactic blow to students countrywide as they looked forward to putting these few tension filled weeks behind can only be felt by those who experienced it but parents across the country have found themselves bewildered by the unexpected shutdown of schools — one of the fallouts of the virus that has the world in its grip.

It is estimated that India has approximately 248 million school-going children in the age group of six to 18. The sudden suspension of examinations and closure of schools mid-way through the school year threw most academicians, parents and students into a tizzy.

Towards the end of March, soon after the lockdown came into effect, when I asked a few large school chains and associations how they were managing or planning to cope, more than one drew a blank. 

Principals and heads of trusts said that many teachers expressed their inability to work with technology, households lacked devices and many expressed difficulties in supervising their wards at home. A majority of schools were taken completely by surprise and it took them weeks to get even a semblance of online teaching going.

Education sector experts and academicians were of the view that barring 3 or 4 million students countrywide —primarily in high-end schools that charged fees of Rs 25,000 and above a month — almost no teaching or learning was happening in the first few weeks, when schools were still fully absorbing what had hit them and trying to formulate a response. In the lower fee segments, it was virtually impossible to find a school delivering any kind of education. In this newspaper, I wrote about an exception that I came across in the city of Lucknow that has been on top of the situation but only because it started to move towards online teaching as early as in 2012.

As it became clear that the virus was not going anywhere in a hurry and that the lockdown would be extended, more schools began to get their act together and almost anywhere one asked, at least three-five hours of classes were being delivered across grades even if the quality was rather patchy. Parents, too, became more responsive; more keen to keep their children occupied and adhere to some kind of schedule than worry about learning loss. A local ICSE school in Dehradun with over 3,500 students (monthly fee of Rs 7,000) that had ground to a halt in March started holding four hours of classes everyday for its 275-odd Grade 12 students as the weeks rolled by — no mean task as teachers are mostly unfamiliar and even frightened of technology.

A few things became evident as the lockdown continued. As a country, we are woefully unprepared to tackle a crisis of this magnitude and online learning remains more on paper than in practice at a macro level. India’s learning poverty — that refers to children unable to read and understand simple text and numbers by the age of 10 — was estimated at 54.8 per cent by the World Bank in 2017. The current crisis is likely to make it worse.

This learning loss is likely to be more acute for children in the age group of six to nine years, the foundational learning years when children are learning to read. This remains the most critical phase in a child’s educational journey as unless he or she learns to read, they cannot read to learn. Experts say that every month of summer vacation sets a child’s learning back by a month at least (many international studies place it far higher). This prolonged lockdown closure is therefore likely to set students back significantly, a loss we are yet to estimate countrywide.

What’s worse is that the lockdown will sharpen the inequalities that already plague Indian society. A recent column by Safeena Husain who runs the NGO Educate Girls in Mumbai argued that young girls in rural India are likely to be the first to slip out of the net, whose studies are not a priority for families to begin with. Moreover, the gap between children who have access to online learning either through the institutions they are associated with or have the means to explore the myriad apps and solutions available in the market and those who don’t will widen.

Perhaps the only silver lining in the crisis is that the Centre, state governments and budget private schools will perforce wake up to this new, alien animal in their midst and hopefully be better prepared for the future, no matter what it holds. Post the pandemic, online education may no longer be dismissed as just a fad.