Covid impact on education

THE EDITOR: Whatever may be said about the management of covid19 on the education front in this country, there are certain critical issues which should be faced:

1. With the continuing online education and its limitations in terms of full cognitive development, which only live, face-to-face intellectual exchange in the learning environment can bring, is it likely that we may be saddled down the road with a generation of the cognitively impaired, ill-equipped to face the complex challenges of the work place in a developing society?

2. Even with such cognitive impairment, would the negative impact not also be psychological, the learner being denied the everyday experience of a “live” learning environment, such as building relationships, coping with competition, failure and success, with bullying and unfair and unjust treatment, adjusting to thwarted dreams and ambition, inter alia?

Wouldn’t the net effect be an individual without the know-how about coping with everday living, denied the necessary “preparation for life” which the school experience brings, and driven into a kind of psychological isolation, leading to delinquencies of one kind or another?

3. Would the prospective differentiation between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in terms of school attendance create further trauma, considering the fact that vaccine hesitancy is increasing by the day, Nicki Minaj and all?

4. What likely impact would it have on the young hoping to transit out of elementary school into secondary, and, as the platform into the next stage of their lives, not being able to take the next step in the way they would have conceived – new uniforms, new books, new friends on their way to a new and exciting environment? Would the isolation at home not dampen their budding spirit for school, for learning, and for the future?

5. As an aside, would the announcement by the Minister of Education that applications for teaching are now closed create problems for curriculum delivery? And further, would that be an obstacle for the young graduates who would have been contemplating teaching as a career?

The father of the nation, Dr Eric Williams, would have told the children of the day that the future of the nation is in their school bags. There could not have been a more poignant metaphor regarding the necessity for education for the young in terms of national development.

True “online” appears as a convenient substitute for real school experience as we know it, but with the fallout attached to it, is it not incumbent on the planners not to locate the children’s education in a “one size fits all syndrome” but to take a clinical look at the way schooling as we know it and how it can be reintroduced not only for the students but for the nation as a whole?

Often I have put forward suggestions as to how this can be attempted on a phased basis, getting the parents involved in a three-half-days-a-week system with strict supervision, with students properly masked and physically distanced in the classroom, all this overlooked by appropriate medical personnel in each school in cases of emergency.

But such an approach takes effort and planning, and with the pressures of covid19 your guess is as good as mine as to whether such is possible

DR ERROL N BENJAMIN

via e-mail