Rethinking education in a co-Covid world

The need of the hour is to envision a way to further the accessibility of education and simultaneously link it to skill and value creation

When Covid-19 struck humankind, schools, colleges and universities screeched to a halt. In a hitherto unimagined lockdown, modes of teaching and learning were overhauled and reimagined. Simultaneously, we were compelled to take stock of how heedless and pointless our education had become. While all of us knew how the prevailing systems of educating people had been problematic, the pandemic, in particular, provided us an opportunity to look at the flawed and jaded systems with renewed clarity.

Education is consistently stressed upon as most necessary for sharpening and utilising the potential we hold. However, when education is imparted in the most uninspiring and unimaginative ways, without regard to the consequences it yields, the potential an individual houses is inevitably blunted. The need of the hour in a Co-Covid world that inches towards post-Covid possibilities is to reassess and reimagine education.

The conventional system of schooling and collegiate education happened to be pointlessly hierarchical and detached from employability and creating human capital. This is precisely the reason why despite the much-promoted surges in literacy rates, there is an acute dearth of people worthy of being placed in specialised positions. After years of attending school and college, the end result often happens to be individuals who are inadequately skilled and unsure of themselves. As Livemint reports, in 2019, according to the India Skills Report by Wheebox, People Strong and CII, 46 per cent of the students surveyed were found to be employable or ready to take-up jobs. This, contrasted with high literacy rates is a paltry number despite the fact that it spiked from 33 per cent in 2014.

Such statistics should have been sufficient reason for us to contemplate and reconsider the way education has failed to create an employable talent pool. On another level, education had also been indiscriminate in its manifestations as everyone, irrespective of their orientation was supposed to fit in a set mould and excel in very limited ways. A child better suited for public policy had to sit through excruciating Physics exams, and a pupil interested in Mathematics had to pass rigorous language proficiency tests. Consistent stressing on marks and grades hampered the possible substantial learning that a child could attain that.

All of this resulted in a disinterested mass of young people going through an apathetic system that did not even guarantee them employment or satisfaction. The emphasis on rote learning and compulsory engagement with irrelevant and impractical courses rendered the youth, bristling with potential, disenchanted and under-skilled.

The pandemic, with all the trouble it caused, forced us to rethink life on the whole and education suddenly clearly seemed like the failed project it had always been. Despite years of learning, people did not know how to appropriately respond to a number of unprecedented situations, ranging from the 'work from home' model to the migrant crisis. This pandemic, then, must be utilized as a stepping stone to newer horizons where we alter our education systems and link education with skill development, employability and fulfilment.

Urgent change needed

One of the first changes we urgently require is to dismantle the mainstream ideas around education and give students more freedom and incentive to work on things which appeal to them and fields where they can make significant contributions. Alternative modes of education which were looked down upon must find space in this new mainstream where skills such as rhetoric, critical reading and writing, application-based Mathematics and several others should be accommodated. On a related note, we must work towards enhancing awareness around every discipline and professional field and the possibilities they hold. In such a scenario, pupils are likely to not just make informed decisions but also choose domains where they can make radical changes.

Another very important aspect that the pandemic highlighted with sheer urgency was the accessibility of education. The usual classroom-based teaching and learning alienated students who had to prepare to go to school and took away huge portions of their time and energy. It also remained unfair to people with disabilities, mental health problems and students in large batches who could not personally interact with the instructors. The shift to the online mode allowed people to transcend physical limitations linked to classrooms, and provided greater ease for communication between teachers and students. Students no longer had to wake up, pack their bags and board buses, and could access learning from their homes. The online meetings also provided opportunities for instant engagement and clearing of doubts with no classroom noise or social anxieties limiting people from asking questions. With these benefits, one could wonder why the online mode, before Covid-19 was seen as alternative and peripheral.

With these observations, we can undeniably assert that the older system of education was crumbling from within and while we have taken long to realize it, it perhaps is better late than never. The older system paid no heed to individual differences and talents and did not concern itself with creating worthy human capital. The need of the hour, consequently, is to envision a way to further the accessibility of education and simultaneously link it to skill and value creation. The freshly introduced set of reforms in India under the New Education Policy 2020, which arrived during the Covid-19 crisis, aim to combine education with vocational training, alongside flexibility in terms of language and modes of teaching-learning. This points towards such heartening possibilities. However, we have to keep assessing and reassessing our ideas around education to avoid stagnation and complacency.

Covid-19 compelled us to critically look at ourselves and gave us ample opportunity to reimagine our ways of being. If the world is never going back to how it was before the pandemic, it is a significantly good idea to not return to an obsolete way of providing education to people. We must alter what did not work earlier, transform education substantially and harvest the brilliance human ability can accomplish.

(The author is founder, Upsurge Global, and Senior Advisor, Telangana State Innovation Cell)