Awaiting a sea change

Apart from totally crippling the health sector, the pandemic forced another core sector — education — to crawl at a snail's pace. Notwithstanding the arguments that the pandemic brought an opportunity in crisis by facilitating the pace of digital education in India, it has only widened the gap, affecting not only the lives of underprivileged and average students but also the prospects of growth of society and nation at large.

Lost advantage

The chaos and confusion are writ large on the faces of students — be it from the urban areas or the rural. Many hold the perception of the Covid period being a wasted year.

Broad segregation of the 'school advantage' would give four basic components — ambience, infrastructure, teacher-student relation and peer learning. The students have been deprived of these much-needed advantages for over a year now. The textbooks and curriculum form the core but are just a minuscule portion of the overall holistic learning.

Ambience: Students certainly are missing the school ambience that provides a space for discipline and coexistence with a diverse set of students. In a world that prefers the nuclear aspect of relationships, schools are a rare place offering an opportunity to grow up collectively. Unfortunately, this ecosystem was disrupted by the pandemic, affecting the grooming of kids. At the same time, for the senior secondary students, the pandemic has been a dark patch that may shadow their career prospects in the future, as they stand on the verge of entering into a profession aligned education path ahead.

Teacher-student relation: Maintaining the teacher-student relation has been a huge challenge in the digital setup. It is rightly said that a good teacher can change a student's life. But what if the teacher-student relation looks no more than rectangular compartments on a digital screen. It would be no exaggeration to say that only a limited few of the students can optimally utilize the digital classes or the course materials. Of course, there are instances of excellent outreach by teachers and teacher groups to address the concerns of students lagging behind, but the core sector of a nation's economy cannot be left on the trust of scattered efforts.

Peer learning: There is an established notion that children learn a great deal from the experiences of elder ones. This may be true to a great extent. But the fact needs to be recognized that a student learns much more from their peers, because they come imbibed with the texture of a new era in the ever-evolving temporal landscape. The new-age students have the knack of catching the nerve of present trends and sentiments — something that cannot be fulfilled through anything.

To go a bit deeper into the reality of the education sector in India and its impact on students, the factor of disparity needs to be taken into account — disparity in a class in terms of comprehensiveness of students along the IQ spectrum, and disparity along the socio-economic spectrum among families of school-going children. Digital classes presently seem to ignore this disparity. Further, certain special students may need the personal touch or an extra bit of impetus from the teachers.

It is no mystery that a majority of Indian households don't have appropriate digital devices or stable internet connections. Digitization of education may come with thousands of benefits but, when coupled with disparity, becomes not just useless but harmful as well — as it pushes talented and skilled children to the margins. What is seen missing in every towering proclamation of digitized learning is the dark shadow it casts over the lives of millions of students due to the absence of an in-built environment that should surround the implanting of digital systems.

Commodification of education

One of the core arguments in favour of the digitization of school education is that it reduces the cost of education. But the critical question is whether this reduction in operating cost of schools trickled down to those who needed it the most. It doesn't seem so. Quality education in India is a costly affair. And its price is determined not only by the cost of operation but also by the demand for it. Those aspiring for a better future for the coming generation in villages migrate to suburbs, live a modest life and invest a significant part of their lives in the education of their kids. With the pandemic wreaking havoc for over a year now, they lost their jobs or had their salaries curtailed. But education remained a high-priced commodity for them — the middle class is aware that quality education is among the last things on the list to be compromised with.

For those at still lower levels on the socio-economic parameter, the situation has been worse. Children from poor families were at least going to substandard private and public schools in the pre-pandemic period. The most hurting dichotomy of school education in India — offering a handful of centres of excellence in the form of costly private schools and very limited government-owned schools on one hand, and a large number of substandard schools on the other hand — is its resounding disparity. Dual standards in school education simply mean that the quality of life of a significant proportion of students is compromised.

The pandemic has forced a rather premature introduction of technology-based digital education in India. A large number of schools, students and teachers may not even have been ready for it. This could potentially further propel the disparity factor. It has to be understood that the term 'digital' is a power in itself in today's world. When it is sprinkled from the top among masses, the ones who are powerful would grab the major share. This factor is inherent in a profit-based capitalist model and overlooks the widening social gap in the nation. The welfare character of India in terms of education is nominally represented by shoddy public schools without adequate teachers and even basic amenities like drinking water and toilets.

Solution

The only solution to the rot in school education in India is the universalization of education. The state will have to take the responsibility on a non-profit basis; though dividends will automatically come when educated youth will take on the task to lead the nation. Governments at all levels should proactively act in collaboration to ensure that the new digital technologies are settled in a way to bridge the gap in the education system, rather than widening it further.

To the multi-layered and multi-faceted problems of India's education system, the solutions will also have to be layered. A uniform ambience for students across the nation will have to be created first which will allow the space for an equitable education to breathe freely. Infrastructural investments have become a key factor in this regard.

Meanwhile, inconsistencies in teachers' recruitment can be eliminated and a meaningful curriculum should be devised by taking in all the stakeholders. The planning should be long-term and focus on fundamentals. Above everything, it is incumbent upon policymakers and social scientists to come out with new-age models — considering the role of digital space and AI — to end the disparity in India's school education. Help can be sought from NGOs that are doing innovative work on the ground.

Views expressed are personal