Even before the pandemic broke out, there was a looming crisis in the education sector, and now it’s in shambles. In December 2019, when the anti-CAA protests broke out, colleges and schools were affected severely. Some famous universities like North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong had to postpone exams like any other university in nearby Assam.
The impact on the final year students has been devastating. The third-semester postgraduate students had one paper left which was postponed to February 2020. One might ask why the exam wasn’t held in January 2020? The reason is Meghalaya has long winter breaks in schools and colleges because of the harsh weather along with the extended celebrations of Christmas and New Year.
Winters are a season of fun and merrymaking, whereas, students get a short summer break of around 15 days. The pandemic is further delaying the process of graduating from college for final year students. Let’s not even get started on the extreme job crisis that further adds to their predicament.
Crisis In Education
The students in Jammu and Kashmir had witnessed even harsher times concerning education when there was an internet lockdown after the abrogation of Article 370. Delhi riots hampered board exams for many students in February 2020. Many had to retake their exams, while some other papers were cancelled because of the ongoing pandemic.
While all of this has appeared a hundred times in our newsfeeds, yet it needs to reiterated because public memory is unfortunately short on the real matters! The current educational crisis is getting lost into oblivion because we all are collectively falling into the trap of yellow journalism.
The kaksha crisis of the major metropolitan cities and even the Hindi heartland still find a place in the media which do not shy away from reporting on-ground realities. Yet, stories from far-flung North East India somehow fail to stoke an emotion among fellow Indians. Even YouTube views do not cross beyond 10,000.
Here’s one story that was reported by the Print last month about a village that’s inhabited by the Sema tribe in the Zunheboto district of Nagaland that has been struggling with internet connectivity to access online exams. There’s another upcoming Facebook Page called Paomi Post which is based out of Imphal in Manipur and has been doing an incredible job in bringing out emotional stories from the insurgency-hit Manipur.
Malnutrition And Inaccessibility To Water: A Double Whammy
Many families in rural India are convinced to send their children to school because of the guaranteed mid-day meals schemes that ensure essential nutrition for at least 200 days per year. In some areas, this scheme also provided eggs, but it creates a problem because of strong caste politics. Remember the time when a journalist in UP was booked because he had exposed a school of serving salt and roti in their mid-day meals? The Yogi government did receive a lot of flak, but it was soon forgotten.
On the other hand, for adolescent girls in rural India, not having any access to the toilet is another major issue as to why there is a huge dropout rate among girls. Many of them defecate in open spaces as there is lack of access to toilets and going out in the field in the wee hours of the day along with their mothers is the only time they get to socialise with other girls and women from the community.
This further poses a serious threat to their health where there is an evident absence of WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) practices. Talking about menstrual hygiene is still a taboo. Young menstruating girls in rural India are further deprived of their educational rights and are forced into the institution of child marriage. The government’s recent decision to increase women’s marriage age is a welcome step, but how rigorously will this be implemented remains a question. This new policy will surely provide an impetus to help India realise her sustainable development goals.
A Perilous Journey For Teachers And Students
With this lockdown, most of us have come across videos wherein teachers have been heavily bullied online by students as young as 13 or 14-years-old. Most of them are anonymous or may take up funny names in the virtual classrooms, and handling them have been a nightmare for many teachers across the globe.
Some even go onto the extent of sharing notorious memes and pornographic material in the chat-box. In June, I was invited to be a speaker in a virtual youth forum, and the language used in the chat-box was absolutely unparliamentary. It does get tough to control this sort of behaviour when one is given the responsibility of managing some 200 plus people on a digital platform.
My mother’s experience with this entire online education system has been equally challenging. She teaches at a government school that is affiliated to the state board (SEBA of Assam). Most of the communication has been through WhatsApp through the exchange of audio files, YouTube links, and notes in pdf files. But many times, it has been observed that girls don’t all have access to smartphones.
The online tests have been conducted in Google Classrooms, and it has been challenging for teachers and students to get a whole idea as to how this entire system works. Most of the students are not able to submit their assignments or test papers on time owing to internet issues. And when they cannot submit on Google classroom, they switch over to WhatsApp where again the picture quality gets constricted.
It’s a first time experience of using online platforms for most of the teachers, and there is a massive fear of ‘what if they mess up with the system’ despite preparing hard before a class. Hence, there is an enormous dependency on their children and spouses who help them cross this hurdle.
The Story Of Sulabh Public School
The Sulabh Public School is located just behind the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, which is one of the weirdest museums in the world dedicated only to toilets. I was fortunate enough to be a part of a summer WASH school programme organised by TERI- School of Advanced Studies (TERI-SAS) in July 2017.
Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, a sociologist and social reformer of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, has been the founder of this school that is registered with CBSE. The primary aim of this model school in Palam, Delhi is to provide education in the English medium to children of the manual scavenging community. This model school has been highly successful in providing education to marginalised communities for many years now.
They also offer vocational training, skill development, especially with regards to digital literacy. There is a dedicated sanitation club in the school which also trains girl students to make low-cost sanitary napkins, thus addressing a tabooed topic.
The school has successfully installed water ATMs which ensures access to safe drinking water in an already water-stressed Delhi. One litre of water is made available for Re 1. The news about such model schools seldom make the news, maybe a paragraph or two in the regional Hindi newspapers. Let’s not even expect anything from TV journalism.
But, even then, what struck me was that the establishment of this amazing school was ghettoised and was quite at a distance from the main road. Why are such model schools being made silently? And even if they make the right kind of noise, such hopeful pieces of information about our society gets sucked in by other forms of a nuisance around and indeed speaks a lot about the collective mentality of our so-called upper caste and upper-class groups!
(Fun fact: Next time you happen to access any toilet in the metro stations of Delhi, look for the signboard. Sulabh International maintains it. They are cleaner than many other public toilets because the maintenance of these toilets are possible under the revenue model of ‘pay and use’.)
Way Forward
As they say, modern problems require modern solutions. We are now in a world that is so wired and inter-connected that denying service as essential as an internet connection is a violation of human rights. The future cannot afford to remain dark that have been hit by insurgency and terrorism for decades now. To penetrate into people’s hearts, there has to be better internet penetration.
We live in times, wherein one way or the other we use at least one of the technologies affiliated to GAFAM, i.e., Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Apple is still restricted to the urban elite as it is exorbitantly priced. Hence, there has to be serious capacity building for most of our school teachers who can take away skills with them that is not just restricted to classrooms.
Consequently, some schools and colleges can involve third parties that can develop alternate learning platforms similar to or better versions of Google Classrooms. Designing such platforms or learning management systems is an equally enriching experience for the designers, giving them room for improvement every time they come up with such themes.
The most significant advantage of reading, learning and writing digitally is that, it is freer and more accessible compared to conventional methods. Hence, making the best use of technology is the need of the hour. Additionally, the focus should be more on skills that can be nurtured right from a young age at our schools.
Not many will like this idea, but there has to be some introduction of moral science or ethics-based subjects for school children for inculcating a holistic value system. The Adolescent Education Programmes (AEP) in the name of sex education needs total revamp. Suppose there is inhibition among the teaching community to help access their students about sexual education. In that case, these children will, unfortunately, rely on a lot of free porn websites, paving the way for more locker room conversations (involving boys and girls) that’s deep-seated in patriarchy, violence and sexual crimes.
There is an evident educational crisis on all levels in our education system, and everyone has a stake in fixing this crisis. Let’s always put a reminder to ourselves that ‘charity begins at home’.