More than 100 crore children around the world were going to school until two years ago. But when the pandemic struck, governments first closed schools with the safety of children being a priority. It was necessary to protect young children from the novel coronavirus. The other concern related to children was how studies would go on. For this, online education was used as an alternative.
For the last two years, most children have been studying online, the benefits and disadvantages of which are being studied by researchers around the world continuously. One research, focused on India with more than 250 million school going children, was done by Boston Consulting Group, a private agency in the US. It tried to analyse the impact of school closures on children due to coronavirus.
The biggest finding of this research was that online studies have disrupted the social and emotional intelligence growth in children. When children go to school, they learn a lot from other children as well. At school, they get an opportunity to communicate not just with other children but also teachers. Some of the things in it are good for children and some things are bad. Children learn how to react to good things and express their feelings on bad things in school.
However, more than 90 percent of children were deprived of social and emotional education for the past two years as they could not get such a facility in the online classes. School teachers are also suffering from the same crisis, because when children came to school to study, teachers had an emotional relationship with every child. They saw the faces of children and understood which child understood the text and who did not understand it. Did the child do his homework or not? If you didn’t do the homework, what was the reason for that? All such things were taken care of by the teachers, but this was also not possible in online studies.
So, more than 80 percent of the teachers in the research believed that while teaching online, they are not able to have an emotional connection with the children even if they want to, which is neither suitable for the children nor is it good for the teacher.
There is also a challenge for 90 percent of the teachers. After teaching, exams also need to be conducted online. Now, teachers have no way to find out how many children who take online tests are studying and answering and how many children are cheating or taking someone’s help. Parents are equally worried. When schools were open, parents could talk to each other parents. But when the schools were closed, parents had a new concern.
In this research, 71 percent of parents reported that their child was not tested for three months or so. If the test or examination is not conducted, parents are not even able to know whether the child understands anything from studying online, or that he is passing only time on computer and mobile.
Children open their mobile or computer on time and sit down. This has also raised the concerns of parents, because when schools opened, there was a timetable for children to sleep, wake up, go to school, play, eat, everything. But in this study, 49 percent of parents admitted that since they started studying online, children have neither a fixed time to study nor a time to sleep or eat or drink. Playing outside has also almost stopped.
This research has been done in India, but the side effect of school closure and online studies is not limited to the country. There is a similar crisis faced by schools and children all over the world. Today, UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) has reported that more than 635 million children are suffering from partial or complete school closure due to coronavirus as many children studying online do not understand the curriculum.
In many U.S. states, two-thirds of thirds of third-grade children in schools are finding it difficult to solve math questions. In poor and low-income countries, 70 out of 100 children are unable to write even simple sentences.
One thing we must remember is that the conditions in different countries, states, cities, and villages are different. So, the challenges are different everywhere. You will find many parents living in the city who are satisfied with online study, and they are not ready to send their child out even when the school reopens. They have computers, laptops, smartphones for their children’s education. There is also power backup of inverters and generators if the house has a Wi-Fi connection and power is lost. Children from such families are feeling the best option online, but for those who are in a small town or village, online studies have no meaning.
