Two decades into the 21st century, humanity is faced with a plethora of unprecedented global crises. After SARS-1, multiple novel avian influenza strains, and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the current COVID-19 pandemic is by far the most severe and widespread public health crisis in at least a century.
This week, Fair Observer featured an article with the title “Social Learning Can Help Transform Crisis Into Opportunity.” The authors, Deborah Brosnan, Andreas Rechkemmer and James Bohland make some important points related to the global crisis affecting education that the coronavirus pandemic has severely aggravated. They highlight a fundamental fact about humanity itself, that any crisis, and more particularly the kind of global crisis the world has been experiencing in 2020, presents an exceptional opportunity for learning.
A new report from the International Monetary Fund says that COVID-19 will increase income inequality in emerging markets and developing countries, “further widening the gap between rich and poor” and increasing the urgency for “investment in retraining and reskilling programs [that] can boost reemployment prospects for adaptable workers whose job duties may see long-term changes as a result of the pandemic.” For many years, these countries have been challenged by disaffected youth along with “wide inequality in education, and large gaps remaining in economic opportunities for women.”
It was instructive that probably the most consequential event in the life of the Indian Republic merited nothing more than three pro-forma single-sentence references to “epidemics and pandemics” in the recently-adopted National Education Policy 2020. The policy must have been discussed and agreed by the Union Cabinet wearing masks, a clear and present reminder of how much has changed. Yet the document approved acknowledges COVID-19 only to exhort higher education institutions to undertake epidemiological research and advocate greater use of technology in delivery mechanisms.
The union cabinet of the government of India recently announced its 2020 National Education Policy (NEP). This is the first education policy developed by a non-Congress party government since independence. Coming 34 years after the last formulation of a fully-fledged education policy, Indians anticipated a significant pivot in the education system to leverage the country’s demographic dividend. India’s current political leadership claimed it wanted to make the country a “,” the Sanskrit word for a world teacher, and would dramatically reform its education. Therefore, great expectations from the NEP seemed natural.
In 2015, world leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly agreed to 17 goals for a better world. Known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the aim is to meet these objectives by the year 2030 in a bid to end poverty, achieve gender equality, ensure access to quality education, promote economic growth and do much more.
In 2020, exams for the 10th grade conducted by India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) led to impressive results. Of the 1.8 million students who took the exam, 10% scored over 90% and 2.23% scored over 95%. In 2019, a similar number wrote the exam with 13% scoring above 90% and 2.23% over 95%, comprising 220,000 and 56,000 students, respectively. If results were an indicator of the state of school education, India is doing quite well.
In a matter of months, the novel coronavirus has swept across the globe and entirely up-ended our understanding of normality. Now, as the virus continues to rage and signs of a second surge are emerging even before the first has ended, we’re rethinking everything we’d assumed and hoped for at the start of the lockdowns. One of the bigger questions that educators, parents and students are having to face right now is how to return to school safely, if at all?
In an article on Al Jazeera published on September 1, Kathleen Siddell, a freelance writer and former teacher who lives in Southern California, made a compelling case concerning the question that many parents on the West Coast (and elsewhere) were concerned about at that moment of history. She sets the scene by evoking the atmosphere at the close of a “sundrenched pandemic summer” in the US. Siddell can be forgiven for not anticipating the sun-obscured skyscapes as a result of massive wildfires that only days later began to impose a foreboding darkness over much of the entire West Coast.
Every good citizen should understand that education is the bedrock of civilization. At the very least, it keeps the children occupied while their parents are outside earning a living. Politicians claim that education is a top priority. But when cornered, they usually admit that budgeting education comes a little further down the list.
