Reviving children’s life skills in the post-pandemic era

Against the backdrop of children trickling back to campuses and classrooms after prolonged socialisation restrictions and isolation, ParentsWorld interviewed several education experts and counsellors to suggest ways and means for parents and teachers to develop students’ life skills even as they focus on remedial academic education in the post-pandemic era, writes Nikhil Jayadevan, Mini P. & Cynthia John Almost 18 months after the Union government first discerned the destructive potential of the Coronavirus (aka Covid-19) pandemic which originated in Wuhan, China in November 2019 and ordered the shutdown of industry, business, trade and education institutions for varying lengths of time, the country is still counting the cost of this deadly global pandemic which has infected 34 million citizens and killed 450,000 countrywide. The Indian economy suffered a 7.3 percent degrowth in fiscal 2020-21 and unemployment is at all all-time high of 7.2 percent. Less discernible is that the rampaging pandemic has inflicted heavy damage upon the country’s already floundering education system. According to a recent report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Covid has severely disrupted the education of 320 million children and youth. Although a small minority of children enrolled from elite and middle class homes in upscale schools have been able to switch to online learning, the majority of the country’s 260 million school-going children have suffered severe learning loss because they are unable to access Internet connectivity and/or digital devices required for online learing. A June 2021 report of the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru estimates the academic learning loss of primary-secondary children at 80-90 percent. Yet beyond academic learning loss which has somewhat belatedly attracted the attention of government and educators, the pandemic has also extracted a heavy toll in terms of loss of life and soft skills learning. Prolonged lockdown of schools, prohibition of socialisation, peer interaction and peer learning has severely damaged the communication, listening, empathy, collaboration and conversational skills of millions of children. Co-curricular education and SEL (socio-emotional learning) loss has compounded loss of academic education. Even before the pandemic disrupted education systems worldwide, the World Health Organisation (WHO) often exhorted policy makers, educators and parents to also focus on developing of children’s life and soft skills to “promote personal and social development, prevent health and social problems, and protect human rights”. In a study paper published in 2019 the organisation recommended development of ten life skills of the children and youth communities — communication, decision-making and problem-solving, creative and critical thinking, self-awareness and empathy, assertiveness, self-control and resilience. Likewise, the Future of Jobs Report 2016 of the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum, lists Top 10 life skills that are essential for children to succeed in complex, multi-cultural and boundary-less workplaces of the new millennium. Among them: problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, emotional intelligence, judgement and decision-making, service orientation, negotiation and cognitive flexibility. Addressing delegates at the annual Davos Summit of World Economic Forum in 2018, Chinese billionaire business magnate, philanthropist and chairman of the online Alibaba Group (annual revenue: $72.3 billion or…