A way forward in education after Covid-19

By C. Kariyawasam

All aspects of human life have undergone change as never before within a matter of months owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the 1918 Spanish Flu carried off nearly 50 million people, it did not rage across the globe. Perhaps, the present crisis is consequent upon glorified globalisation, which is no respecter of geographical boundaries, and a return to the world that existed before may not be possible in the foreseeable future.

COVID-19 has not only created a severe economic cost but also affected everyone socially, psychologically, culturally, etc. In such a world of increasing uncertainty, we cannot be complacent about our high literacy rate and other achievements in the education sector. Therefore, a paradigm shift is essential for a new normal era in education for millennials and others who are ‘growing up digitals’. 

A country’s most precious asset is its human capital, which has to be developed to the fullest. Education will have to undergo radical changes. Some of the educational concepts worth consideration are as follows:

* Teach all the healthy way of life so that every person could be an asset to society and be productive through life and throughout life. It is a duty to live a healthy life. (The idea of duty is a foremost value in the Eastern countries. Incidentally, the Indian Constitution has 10 duties the Indians are expected to perform, the implication being that rights are derived from duties)

* Develop a road map for comprehensive digital transformation of education – To what extent ‘digital divide’ will be minimised to provide equal opportunities to the marginalised is a question that has to be answered.

* Rethink the goals, curricula, content, methods and authentic assessment. It also means changing the culture of learning and teaching drastically to adopt methods such as hybrid schooling—virtual and physical—where necessary. When knowledge is at our fingertips, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and value components have to be incorporated into each lesson to enable high-ordered thinking and skills in students. Consequently, the teacher’s role has to be redefined more as a tech-suave educator rather than a sage on the stage like the teacher described by Oliver Goldsmith in his poem, The Deserted Village and later by Charles Dickens in Hard Times, where Mr. Gradgrind teaches facts and facts only.

* Produce nationally and globally multicompetent millennials.

* Learn to be adaptable to an uncertain future as one has to navigate the turbulent waters of change. According to Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

* Increase professionalism of educators as no education system is better than its teachers and it is the mother of all professions.

* Stimulate intellectual curiosity of students.They must be endlessly curious like Leonardo Da Vinci, the multi-splendored personality of the renaissance had an unquenchable thirst for learning and was known for his out-of-the square thinking.

* Incorporated into the curriculum concepts such as resilience, empathy, accountability and proper attitude to work as outlined in the ‘decent work’ ideal of the ILO. It is of interest to note the quote of William James, the American philosopher and psychologist: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a humanbeings can alter his life by altering his attitude’.”

* Empower learners to learn by themselves. Anytime, anywhere learning with no one left behind has to become the New Order in the best of times and the worst of times.

* Learn to follow a liveable simple lifestyle by abstaining from vulgar conspicuous consumption, which was followed by great savants then and in the recent past. Emphasize the philosophy that one cannot desire for infinite needs in a finite world.

* Respect multi-culturalism. If we are a culture that thinks we know everything and anything then we are trapped into a closed mind.

* Protect and nurture our mother Nature and the environment as the ancient saints, sages, savants and the other responsible citizens did. It was only after the Industrial revolution that the conquistador attitude to nature came into being. Revelations of the late Stephen Hawking and the recent speech by the UN Secretary General brought out the idea that the harm done to nature is suicidal.

* Helped to alleviate poverty further by developing skills as it is said that poverty anywhere destroys prosperity everywhere.

* Consider that Education itself becomes evil if its aims are not virtuous. It is claimed that Diogenes, the ancient cynic philosopher went around Athens holding a lantern to search a virtuous man.

* Value the thought that all those who are educated have to be job makers rather than jobseekers with a dependent syndrome mindset.

*Recognise that every learning has to be translated into an action (the American Pragmatic idea is that every word has a cash value).

* Cultivate a sense of duty without which life will become dry as dust and robotic and then we are losing the meaning of Life to a superficial materialistic Sensate Culture hypothesized by the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin.

The crowning effect of education should be achieving human greatness, truth, a sense of beauty and goodness. Such is the wisdom ancient sages of the East and savants of the West have sought for the creation of a ‘brave new world’ in the face of a global crisis.

(The writer is a senior academic and a former Head of a Department of the Faculty of Education University of Colombo. This is an extract of his forthcoming book titled ‘Educating the Sri Lankan for the New Era’).