by Madeline Lee
In the course of a couple of months, volatility over the lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic has led national governments to impose lockdown and curtail economic activity, stripping billions of people of financial security. One key measure to limit the risk of contagion was school and university closures.
Unfortunately, many of the attempted solutions for the issue posed a risk of leaving students further behind. The repercussions of the crisis for education could be seen in different ways, both gradual and immediate. Education systems responded with distance learning solutions, all of which offered less or imperfect substitutes for classroom instruction. At the peak of the closure period in April 2020, 91% of the global student population was affected in 194 countries.
In the midst of online learning, students in economically and socially disadvantaged regions (especially in rural areas) are considerably less able to gain access to quality remote education programs than students in more privileged communities.” The Department of Statistics Malaysia determined that 30 percent of university students experienced moderate-to-severe anxiety levels during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown period, but 63 percent of households were unable to access public education as a result of poverty and structural exclusion in these localities. Senior Minister Radzi Jidin revealed that as many as 36.9 percent of Malaysian students lack devices for e-learning, and only 5.8 percent have access to personal computers.
Other than the scarcity of digital devices for remote learning—most notably among non-citizens and the B40 community—the battle during this pandemic was not for comfort but for survival. COVID-19 had brought with it tremendous social, health, and economic hardships, and these struck the poorest communities the hardest. Immigrant families were unable to access public education pre-COVID-19 as a result of poverty and systemic exclusion. Marginalized by multilateral discrimination, these are the same families denied from a plethora of essential health and education services now.
School closures have reaffirmed what was already evidently clear: that Malaysia’s current systems have failed youths. Its impact has thus been felt widely and deeply not only by learners, but the entire education ecosystem. Taking into account the physical hurdles and psychological distress experienced by students, this raises vital, urgent considerations of ‘What happens next?”
Our institutional framework of coercive, mechanistic education is restricting human potential. Robotic, search-engine-like people will not have jobs or choice in their lives in the future; the intricacies of the world necessitate a stronger bond to our most human traits—creativity, compassion and inquisitiveness—rather than the computational reasoning and regurgitation that our system so efficaciously engenders with its methodologies and targets.
Everyone is expected to profit from education systems. The basic monetary purpose of education is the fact that it provides production in the form of scientific knowledge. Science and technology have always been the key productive forces. In the earlier post-World War II, economic growth reached the same stage as capital deposition and technological advancement; Japan achieved great success; in the latter part, economic growth evolved into a technological innovation-led type.
That is to say, education not only serves the country’s monetary development by cultivating qualified personnel for a country and augmenting senior researchers to provide society with new science and technology. When science and technology penetrate the various elements of production, they will transform into huge actual productivity and promote economic growth.
Nevertheless, education has long been considered as the great equaliser, presenting possibilities for advancement regardless of one’s socioeconomic status. Unfortunately, education systems are now net contributors to the world’s plummeting rates of social mobility. It’s easy to grasp why.
Education systems are hierarchical in origin, with the purpose of facilitating “the best and the brightest” into professions and occupations with the greatest potential for private monetary prosperity. Elite education institutions, examination-based grading systems and achievement-based streaming all contribute to an education system stratification that closely parallels the financial stratification of today’s society.
We must ask ourselves why graduates spend a lifetime deprogramming what they were taught in school, why we talk about nurturing world community but fail to teach kids to protect and cherish their planet, why we say we want self-motivated learners but just don’t give them a choice, and why we build ‘schools’ for students who we think of as fish—all analogously moulded and moving together when we know they are not.
The current public debate over the what, when, and how of schools reopening has highlighted the fact that, in many societies, there is no shared view of the purpose and function of education. It has proven that we do not have a shared view of many of the basic questions.
What is the task of schools? What does compulsory education include? Who is responsible for the well-being of children and young people? How does the education system function as a system and how are the roles in decision-making, in the context of education, determined?
It is only when governments and members of society can agree on these essential questions that social and political coactions can be marshalled to make the necessary investments in education required to build back better after the crisis.
Schools are not just about economic preparedness; the ultimate purpose of schooling is to empower young people with the information, skills and dispositions that enable them to thrive—to build well-being by design. We must abolish the ‘school’ paradigm and instead build an education ecosystem with room for different models—of teaching and learning as well as business—from startups and established businesses and find out what works.
Refusing to liberate youths and educators is to miss the untapped potential of passion-led learning. Now is the chance to redefine success in better terms.
With many systems abandoning their systematic assessment, now is the time to refocus assessment emphasis towards the developmental progressions of key human capacities, ones that are currently in stark relief. Skills like self-regulation—possibly the most vital skill within the context of classroom conformity—is replaced by virtual possibilities.
In their article, Sara Ruto and Rajarshi Singh highlighted how Kenyan parents “are fighting an uphill task of supporting their children’s learning, given their need to work from home and manage extremely tumultuous economic situations.” They argue that, in a “re-imagined future,” governments would partner with the private sector to provide comprehensive support, including access to digital devices and “adequate social safety nets” to support education and families during times of crisis. Across the board, the empowerment of young people and teachers through fostering co-agency and welfare through a sense of belonging, connection and autonomy is an investment we simply have to make. We must centralise the well-being of students and teachers in both practises and policies, seizing on the power of impact, evidence-informed social-emotional learning.
Overall, COVID-I9 has accentuated many of the obstacles and issues in education that existed previously, such as learning curricula for the 21st century, disparities, assessments, the use of technology or investing in teacher professionalism. According to the OECD Teacher and Learning International Survey, only 60 percent of teachers have received professional development about the use of the Internet and technology, while 20 percent report needing help in this particular sector.
Education leaders in schools and at the system level have the opportunity to consider how to weave in lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to reimagine the delivery of education in ways that are adapted to the 21st century. They have done it promptly in times of need and can now take a bit more time to reconstruct and redefine the future. Now is the time to rise to the challenge of educational leadership.
Social recognition and political consensus have concluded that education, and importantly, schools and teachers, are as essential as a vaccine to recovering from this crisis. The essential purpose of education is to augment human flourishing, not to train the workforce of today, tomorrow, or yesterday. Governments should safeguard the stability of higher education institutions by elevating public funding for education above other sectors in order to foster innovation. Private investors should also step up and acknowledge that expenditure on education benefits both communities and risk-takers.
We need to refocus attention on education policy issues that matter but are routinely disregarded. Society needs to persuade governments to place principles at the core of teaching and learning, many of which were valued during the response to the pandemic but may have since been forgotten: solidarity, empathy, fairness, trust and awareness of our basic humanity. As the Joint Statement on the COVID-19 Crisis issued by the International Commission on the Futures of Education underscored, the global health pandemic “will not be vanquished by health measures alone”. We need to urge governments to recognize the role of interpersonal interactions and well-being or of learning outside school. Countries will need to engage in teaching students how to use technology—to respect others, to safeguard their freedom of expression, and to process information.
A worldwide economic downturn entails lower municipal revenue and expenditure. We don’t know how long austerity will be in place to recover the expenses of emergency measures or how much resources are going to be reallocated. The financial catastrophe we confront right now will be worse than the great financial crisis of 2007-2008. More than ever now, we must remind the world that education is one of the best weapons for forging a more inclusive and resilient world. The international education architecture has become splintered, which means that multilateral organisations engaged in education need to likewise make their transformation. The joint action that arose by institutions like UNICEF and UNESCO in the Global Partnership for Education assistance is a start in the right direction that should be capitalised upon.
The fundamental remaking of education can no longer be considered a remote ambition. It must begin immediately, as without education, we will be unable to repair enterprises or strengthen communities decimated by the pandemic. This is due to the reality that our ability to progress in the decades following the crisis is entirely contingent on our capacity to make education more personalised, flexible, and comprehensive. Education must acknowledge that the best thing we can do is develop individuals whose success in life is built on being outliers rather than conformists. That means establishing an international dedication to funding education so that it can be what it can be and what we need it to be today more than ever.