“It is said you can survive forty days without food, eight days without water, and eight minutes without air, but you can’t survive for a second without hope. Hope doesn’t just die when food convoys cannot get through or ventilators are not available; it can die when young people feel they don’t have a chance to plan for, or dream of, the future. And we have to face the fact that it will die unless we take the necessary action.” – Gordon Brown
The two years 2020 and 2021 will be remembered not only as the pandemic years with health and economic problems but also as the greatest education crisis in living memory as lockdowns put an abrupt halt to regular in-school learning and school/university and system leaders, as well as teachers, parents, and students, had to rapidly switch to remote teaching/learning processes. As schools and higher educational institutes cautiously reopen, this is a good time to analyse what changes, if any, will the Covid-19 crisis have imposed on learners, teachers, institutes, and education systems as a whole?
Rapid response
As schools, universities and policymakers were developing and implementing rapid-response schemes at a pace and scale never seen before to introduce remote teaching/learning procedures, important and discussions and analyses about challenges, deficits and inequities within systems did not seem to be a priority. An important aspect of such analyses would be to examine what type of leadership is needed to guide education systems through these difficult times introducing positive changes beyond the pandemic-induced crisis.
Stakeholders
Educational leadership together with policymakers should be willing and able to examine the very core of education itself, inspiring reflective thinking among the stakeholders at all levels on the purpose and values at the heart of the process. Though education is no longer considered as a necessity for human development other than as an instrument for economic progress, the institutions claim to be providing such education use phrases such as “student-centered learning” and “opportunities for individualised programs” that are contradictory to the assembly-line like process of issuing diplomas and degrees.
Such institutions have become almost like automated diploma/degree producing factories in their efforts to make the process as customer friendly as possible to attract better clientele. The world has accepted this concept of using children as raw material for these education factories in the process of manufacturing adults the market needs to sustain the economic progress.
Artificial Intelligence
Navigating through all the new concepts and trends, such as, student-centered teaching, use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart classrooms, digital libraries, Internet of Things (IoT) through Learning Management Systems (LMS), online teaching/learning and assessments, bite-sized learning, Integrated/Blended Learning, Blockchain technology, all the way to virtual schools and universities, in the field of education, has itself become an intimidating challenge for all the stake holders involved in the process. Instead of educational philosophies and human interactions, new technologies have started dictating the future of teaching-learning processes. Covid-19 pandemic forced almost all the formal education systems of the world to use these technologies without any knowledge about the feasibility or the possible negative effects, if any.
Leadership
Post-Covid educational leadership will have to spend the better part of their time and energy in humanising future education approaches while recognising that the teaching/learning process is collaborative and is deeply connected with the life-long pursuit of happiness. They will need to prioritise key competencies such as social and emotional learning and wellbeing in the quest to continue creating inviting and sustainable learning environments in the future.Leadership at every level – from School Teachers, Principals, Zonal Officers, Directors, Vice Chancellors, University Grants Commission officers, Education Ministry officers to Ministers of Education –is a critical part of education systems and never more so than in the current context of the pandemic.
The cycles of school and university closures around the world have clearly demonstrated how important good leadership is to teaching/learning at all levels. Education leaders cannot simply go about business as usual since leading through a crisis and beyond means creating pathways to navigate by being innovative and resilient.
Studies show that almost a third of the changes in learning can be attributed to leadership, making it second only to classroom teaching in its impact on education out comes. Yet leadership is often given little attention, and there has not been enough investment to understand how to best select and professionally develop leaders so they can be ready to face crisis situations with their leadership qualities that includes the will to act in the interest of the common good and creativity intact.
Damage inflicted on an institution or a system by appointing individuals, without such qualities and a broader perspective of the responsibilities and expectations of the office, to leading positions of educational institutions merely to be used as pawns in the game of power politics can be much worse than any negative impact from all the natural disasters combined.
Students and parents in countries such as Sri Lanka are primarily interested in the Grade Five Scholarship, GCE O/L and A/L exams and, therefore, the policy makers also feel that fixing the dates for those examinations and restarting the schools for those classes would make majority of their constituents happy.
What about more important information such as the rate of transmission of Covid in the area and the percentage of vaccinated people among the school age children and their family members, school staff and the community in general?
Community
Whether a child or a teacher or any other staff member should go to school depends on their health condition, the current transmission of Covid-19 within their community and the protective measures the school and community have in place.Current evidence suggests that people with underlying conditions such as chronic respiratory illness including asthma, obesity, diabetes, or cancer are at higher risk of developing severe disease than others, irrespective of the age of the person.
Have the Public Health Inspectors and Medical Officers in the area been communicating with the school officials and parents of the students about the epidemiology of Covid-19 sharing such statistics with them so that everyone will have an idea about the risk factors and also how to avoid that risk? Do the stakeholders know the transmission intensity in the area where the school operates: No cases, sporadic, cluster or community transmission? Have the community been informed about the overall impact of school closure on education and physical and mental wellbeing of students?
Do the stakeholders have an idea about the effectiveness of remote teaching/learning strategies that are available to them? Are there any plans in place to get the students involved with extra-curricular activities with proper safety procedures?
Symptoms
Are the school officials and the local health authorities able to act quickly if a student or a staff member starts showing any symptoms of Covid-19 or shows an adverse reaction to the vaccination? Should there be a check list for the students/parents and the staff to decide whether to go to school or not if they experience any symptoms of Covid-19 and should the absentees be excused without a doctor’s note? What if a family member shows symptoms?
It is very important to have specific procedures in place to address all such possibilities, and a major ingredient needed for that certainly is adequate funding.
That perhaps is why Gordon Brown, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education has warned, especially the low- and middle-income countries, about the danger of large-scale cuts to education spending which will be a recipe for disaster. He has also indicated that:
“Education is being crowded out as other areas are prioritised for expenditure and aid. Financing education has to be taken seriously, because we cannot send teachers into classrooms without the resources they need, and children into schools without the backing.
A human tragedy is unfolding if we do nothing and leave education completely underfunded. We must persuade countries that not cutting the education budget is not just in the interest of education, it is in the interest of quality of life.”
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fourteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]