“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” -Vivan Greene
“I have arranged for a loudspeaker system on a cart”… “We teachers have pooled in money to get data recharges for parents”… “I want my son to become an engineer. With this pandemic I can’t let his studies get affected”… “It’s really difficult in different time zones- I have to wake up hours at night and sleep under sunlight.”
Coronavirus, while sweeping away millions of lives, carried with it an even larger number of fertile young minds, thereby depriving the future of the country, of its knowledge, and the world of next decades, of its future inventions, its future income, and its future advancements. However, this hideous virus, initially thought of as an apocalypse of education, actually handed new ideas to us, made us traverse the formerly unexplored horizons, and unveiled to us the new way of life. Computerisation and automation made us realise that classrooms also have alternatives. This ‘new normal’ made the technologically challenged, tech-savvy, and dynamized the static way of learning.
However, the big question is, “Was there a uniformity in the change?” Did all the regions and countries experienced it the same? No, there were vast differences about the way people went about it, be it rural and urban, lower and upper class, children or college going, Indian or foreign. Let us see how these different communities confronted and weathered this crisis.
Students in School
The predominant predicaments faced by the students in their school years were- technological inaccessibility, dearth of infrastructure, irregular jobs of parents/helping hand in farming, as well as distraction, decreased focus, cheating and usage of other unethical means.
Rural areas and villages
“Amidst the COVID crisis, Imran Khan, a farmer, has started spending his evenings tutoring his 12-year-old son. With feeble internet connectivity and accessibility in his Khair village in UP, he has to go near the village’s panchayat office, where internet connectivity is comparably better. Imran, who himself has studied till class 10 and had to drop out of school to help his father at the farm, said he downloads pdfs of different subjects and learns from them during the day to teach his son. “I want my son to become an engineer. With this pandemic I can’t let his studies get affected,” he said, as mentioned above.”
Students, such as aforementioned, face several challenges. The digital literacy, though now escalated, is still lacking in rural areas. Even when this issue is solved, infrastructural development and technological penetration remain big questions. Another problem faced is the scarcity of teachers.
Despite these challenges, solutions are being innovated. Enthusiastic teachers as well as other volunteers have opted to use loud speakers and public announcement systems for education while, genuinely, maintaining social distance. People are also pooling and collecting money and donations for buying gadgets and for their recharge.
Urban Areas
Income disparities have paved the path for different ways of confrontation by the lower class, middle class, and the upper class. According to a survey, the percentage of people who were able to use the internet (all-India) stood at 20.1%, with rural at 13% and urban at 37.1%. Additionally, only 10.8% of people in India had used the internet in the last 30 days.
Lower Class
Unlike their well-off counterparts, the poorer strata of children continue to struggle for connection, construe the teacher’s cracked incoming voice, switch their video on and, largely, attend the lessons themselves, due to lack of devices at homes. This initial struggle, gradually seems to have turned into frustration, and now, eventually, carefree attitude, wherein, these unfortunate children lost interest and walked away, misplaced their previously kept notes, and to add fuel to flames, they forgot the learning of the past. On the flip side of coin, extremely poor children of urban casual labourers in slums, are the most disadvantaged, who didn’t even get the opportunity to grasp the bits and pieces of knowledge provided. They, as has been the case in several states, migrated with their family to villages and worked on farms, with their disguisedly unemployed parents.
Nutritional status was also weakened, as several students, who were dependant on the mid-day meal scheme, now struggled for meals with their families furloughed.
Middle Class
The middle class, on the contrary, were at least able to keep their heads above water. Although paucity of electronic gadgets still persists, the education during lockdown for these children has been quite continuous. A problem, though minor, faced by them is that many a times, in several schools, instead of online classes, pre-recorded videos and study material are provided, thus estranging students from the interaction needed, along with no provision for clearance of doubts.
A trickle-down effect followed, wherein, parents now started spending increasingly more money on tuitions so that their children could enjoy the little interactive classes they could afford. Middle class parents, who want their children to go to the top universities and succeed in life through better jobs, got filled with a sense of despair, along with a feeling of uncertainty about their child’s future.
Upper Class
The upper class, genuinely, had the most comfortable time comparably. The widespread aforementioned problems were already solved before the lockdown for these privileged. The only causes of distress were the facts that students were not able to do the practicals, physical and mental health weren’t being looked after, and a minor one was the lack of tourism, occasionally leading to depression. The parents were also worried about the screen time and potential sensory impairments such as eye defects, or ear defects due to headphone’s radiations.
College Students
A mental health study done on over 8,000 individuals found that college students were the most affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown. Students recorded a six-per-cent increase in the emotions of anger and irritability at the beginning of the restrictions and a 13-per-cent increase in the emotions of loneliness and boredom, according to the study.
Another research revealed that among the university students, 43% considered this lockdown as a convenient break from routine. Duration of sleep had increased in 68% of the university students. Screen time had increased among 78% of the students.
Primarily, though the college students initially found the lockdown as a delightful break, they soon started missing their friends, their campus, and kept yearning for the long awaited ‘happy go lucky college life.’ The Indian students formerly studying at Indian Institutes, faced the problem that they were uncertain and doubtful about their future. They thought they could face a lack of job opportunities if this continues. Although these problems are significant and much to be worried about, the problems faced by the Indian students, formerly studying at abroad-universities, outweigh them by far. The most vital problem, to be laconic, is that their day cycle has reversed. As mentioned in the introduction, just to attend the online classes being taken in foreign countries, say the US, Indian children have to wake up and study, not to mention with full focus, during the night, thereby, automatically making them sleep during the day. This could have been fine if the students were alone, but they do so while with their families. The families now have to these students.
Another obstacle being confronted is the fact that people are being coerced to pay huge amount of fees just to attend online lectures of foreign universities.
Anecdotes- Mixed bag
Evidently, this is not happening in India solely. Desperate times call for desperate measures in all countries. Following is the case in Syria, as reported by UNICEF.
“I created a WhatsApp group for my Grade one self-learning students as a temporary substitute for the classroom,” says Mr. Saleh Al-Sawah, a teacher at a UNICEF-supported multi-service platform in Kafr-Laha that supports out of school children or those at risk of dropping out. ““I set up weekly schedules with help from the centre, then send digital invitations to my students in advance. Though we struggle with poor internet connection in the area and the lack of enough mobile phone devices available to children, the students have all been eager to continue learning during the lockdown.”
As presented by UNESCO, the following anecdotes were recorded.
“As the schools are closed, me and my siblings are spending our free time together by doing a lot of creative things such as painting.- student, Greece
“Our school has been closed, but our teacher created a channel on the Telegram app to send our homework and explain the lessons to us.”- student Iraq
Conclusion
To sum up, this crown shaped virus swept with it a colossal number of student minds, leaving them in a struggling situation, open to confront all sorts of obstacles such such as scantiness of technological advancement, less infrastructural development etc. as mentioned above. Solutions have been initiated by different places, in various ways. A general solution may be central-governmental initiatives and policies. Interest groups and volunteers should mobilise themselves towards providing succour, to confront this crises safely and boldly, not individually, but together- united.
“In education, technology can be a life-changer, a game changer, for kids who are both in school and out of school.” -Queen Rania of Jordan
-Vivasvat Rastogi
Bibliography
https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/featurephilia/story/covid-19-impact-4-major-challenges-faced-by-students-of-rural-india-1709294-2020-08-10
https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/e-learning-in-rural-india-parents-teacher-scrambles-for-innovative-ways-to-teach-students-amid-covid-19/story-xgbTYVXj3Dn64dGiVnPMAK.html
https://www.firstpost.com/india/in-delhi-remote-learning-during-covid-19-leaves-less-well-off-grappling-with-digital-divide-and-teachers-ruing-lack-of-training-8688121.html
https://www.unicef.org/mena/stories/unicefs-innovative-distant-learning-method-provides-education-children-during-lockdown
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coronavirus-covid-19-india-lockdown-migrant-labourers-students-6420009/
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/parents-teachers-scramble-for-access-to-e-learning-in-rural-india-11593948421008.html
https://thewire.in/education/coronavirus-lockdown-education-students
https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/learningneverstops
