With the third wave Omicron variant of the novel Coronavirus, which ill-advisedly prompted first the Central and later state governments to impose the most prolonged lockdown (82 weeks) of education institutions from pre-primaries to universities upon the children of India not proving as deadly as the previous Delta variant, schools, colleges and universities have resumed on-campus teaching-learning. However because of exaggerated caution in the matter of reopening schools for fear of the impact of the virus on children, teachers and the world’s largest child and youth population have a long, hard road ahead to make good the learning loss of almost two years.
In my opinion, the best solution is to declare the past two academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22 — the education lockdown was imposed on March 25, 2020 and has only recently been relaxed — zero academic years. That is children in K-12 education, even if not in higher education, should start the new academic year from the time they were shut out of classrooms. Or if not for two years, at least for one.
Mysteriously, this proposal is considered blasphemous. This proposition made in a lead feature in our February issue (educationworld.in/declare-2021-22-as-zero-academic-year/) has been greeted with sullen silence by teacher and parent communities. But there’s no side-stepping the grim reality that in the vast majority of the country’s 1.5 million primary schools — especially historically under-provisioned 1.2 million government schools — children have not received any meaningful education for two years.
In this connection, the deafening silence from Shastri Bhavan, Delhi which houses the Union education ministry and its newly (July 2021) appointed minister Dharmendra Pradhan, is bewildering. Even as all requests for an interview remain unacknowledged, one has not heard a single utterance from the Rt. Hon’ble minister on vital issues such as reopening of schools, remedial education, the meagre provision for education in Union Budget 2022-23, mental health and well-being of children during the prolonged lockdown, or indeed any words of comfort or reassurance to the world’s largest population of children and youth.
Be that as it may, in this issue we present a ten-point agenda to rescue India’s cruelly neglected children and youth from the hard grind ahead of them following the world’s longest education lockdown. Even if the minister has no time for our prescription, educationists, educators and enlightened parents should study it seriously. There’s too much at stake.
Our unprecedented cover story apart, there’s much more in this first post-pandemic issue. Check out our second lead story on the rising popularity of the Gap Year, our stimulating People profiles, editorials and book reviews. Even though I may not be entirely objective, no other news publication provides as rich a mix.
