All is now fair in India’s ailing pedagogic spaces

Context: COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology-based tools and methods in pedagogic space of our schools but has also led to apprehensions about their need and effect on a child’s psychological health.

Reasons for fast adoption of Virtual learning:

• Covid-19: Smartphones have replaced the need of laptops for accessing digital contents.
  • Sense of lack of alternative to going online erased the need to make stage-wise distinctions, age-specific provisions and rural schools region-wise facilities.
• Vested interests: Like Information technology related industries, online coaching companies, etc. are under pressure to tap the huge potential market children offer.
  • E.g. Unsubstantiated claims made by private companies that their courses will protect children from learning losses incurred due to school closure.
• False assumption: that schools in the West and countries such as Japan are more tech-savvy has served as a populist guide to school policies in India.
  • E.g. While Japan is said to be replacing printed textbooks with digital ones, nothing of this kind has happened on any scale in reality.
  • Provision of a hands-on experience and printed material remained undisturbed in primary schools even under pandemic conditions in Europe, Japan and China.
• The competitive culture: entrenched in the social ethos fits in well with the new regime of frequent regular testing and the thriving market of ready-made tests.

Associated fears with virtual learning:

• Long screen hours: and associated health issues.
• Exposure to manipulative advertisements: violent entertainment and pornography and Fantasy Apps
• For E.g. Moral criticism of the video game market has failed to discourage the kinds of material that parents might otherwise find objectionable.
• Inability of parents and children to verify claims made by coaching organisations: put economic and educational well-being of the children at risk.
  • For E.g. The claim that courses on coding will enhance the analytical skills and structural awareness of elementary schoolchildren.
• Loss of respect for natural pace of intellectual maturation and the importance of hands-on experience.
  • Children whose sense of context is confined to a rectangular screen can hardly be expected to transfer their analytical ability to social or human situations.

Conclusion: Reconciling the new technological environment with child psychology and educational theory and allowing for age wise specificity with rural consideration should be the goal of educational transformation.