'We should not allow this school year to be lost forever. "
'We should not allow this school year to be lost forever. "
With the flattening of the COVID-19 curve, as the UP Octa Research team found, there is need to clarify the measures with which each sector will restart as the country transitions into the new normal.
The 76-page paper "We Recover As One," which NEDA Acting Director General Karl Chua and his staff recently issued for peer and public review, details a comprehensive set of measures to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to enable the economy to recover and thereby allow the country to move forward from a six-month lockdown. Chua noted that the report “provides guidance as to what priority policies, programs, and projects the government can undertake to facilitate the transition not just to a new, but a better normal..”
While the education sector was clearly identified as one such critical sector in the restart process, it will take some time before we can fully determine whether the measures put together by the DepEd and the CHED are up to the task, so to speak.
We are talking here not just of the learning processes involved but the totality of the sector’s impact on the entire restart effort. That workout does not just involve us but all countries worldwide as we all struggle to find ways to rescue what some policy makers have come to describe as a “lost generation” of young people finding their place in the scheme of things.
As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted “the COVID-19 pandemic has led
to the largest disruption of education ever.” Indeed, the disruption has not spared any country of note as schools in 185 nations closed as of mid-August. This has affected more than one billion students. Of these, no less than 40 million children worldwide have missed out on their critical pre-education year, others about to transition out of the tertiary levels while the vast majority caught up in between basic and tertiary education grades.
In the Philippines, enrollment in basic education, which stood at 24 million as of last count, may be commendable, but we are told that there remains at least another 2 million to 3 million who have yet to be enrolled. Joblessness has prompted some parents to ask their children to skip this school year.
There is also the fact that hundreds of private schools are closing while others are busy holding on hoping that somehow the economy’s restart will be sooner than their possible collapse. The disruption has been such that historians consider it far worse than during the two world wars.
If we agree that, as Guterres said, “education is the key to personal development and the future of societies…it is the bedrock of informed, tolerant societies and a primary driver of sustainable development,” then how we will cope with this disruption should be of foremost concern. It will determine how it can shape the kind of society we will become years from now.
So far, the measures put in place seem to be adequate for a start. But the burdens and the hurdles for a better and more equitable way in delivering learning services remain. Parents have to assume additional burdens quite apart from holding families and kitchens together. Learners with disabilities, those belonging to minorities and disadvantaged communities, displaced students as well as those in remote areas have to surmount a host of hurdles before they can be provided the most basic of services.
One mother said in an interview: “We have to work double time to keep ourselves afloat, we barely have anything for gadgets and supplies and no more time to check on the lessons which will surely be given to my kids.” By far, these mothers and the families they keep are considered the bulk, maybe close to 90 percent, of the total numbers in distress highlighting yet again the inequities in societies everywhere.
So, even as the DepEd and CHED are doing their best to keep the educational norms in as proper and sustainable a manner as possible, we will have to resign ourselves to the fact that it will take loads and loads of efforts, giant steps even to get us on even keel. And the losses are compounded over time. The World Bank has estimated that every additional year of schooling has a corresponding return of eight percent to 10 percent of a student’s future income.
But more than the future loss of incomes, we are talking here of the student’s mental health and upbringing, the family’s burdens as well as the standing of communities. Losing a year or even just a semester will have consequences for a student, what more for the millions who, for one reason or the other, will have to sit out school year 2020-2021.
In addition to the above, several studies by prominent educators have shown that putting off one school year degrades the quality of learning of those caught up in the maelstrom – even if some sectors are suggesting that lessons can be taken from a plethora of learning devices including Wikipedia. It has been shown that there is no substitute to interactive, whether face-to-face or blended, learning with programmed lessons and learned instructors properly attuned to the basic nuances of the learning process.
Education is the key to a full recovery. There should be no question about the need to put in place a total, comprehensive frame to get the measures and processes in place. This should be more than enough reason to dissuade any right-thinking person from even suggesting that we should just let this school year pass and let everybody just move on to the next level. Or, worse, simply declare this school year as lost forever.