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In the nearly five months of national lockdown, beyond slowdown of the economy, job losses, the shutdown of all educational institutes due to the rapid spread of coronavirus in the country has impacted the entire education sector in India. India has been under lockdown since March 25,2020 with educational institutions remaining close. India’s education sector is facing unprecedented challenges and needs to adapt and find solutions to keep children motivated and in their route to learning. What this means is that, for millions of Indian students, the lockdown has brought all education to a complete halt. Since, access to midday meals is the primary reason so many Indian students attend school, if the lockdown continues for much longer, there is a chance that India’s dropout rate-which is already among the world’s highest-might increase further. On the other hand, a minority of students attending urban private schools are seeing their education continue through standard digital platforms. For pupils, the lockdown doesn’t just mean reduced cashflow or a professional setback; it represents an interruption to their learning journey. It is worse in the case of drop outs and proving to be the final straw for at-risk children who struggled to get an education at the best of times. The lockdown has aggravated deep-set class and social differences, especially between private and public school systems. The central government spends 4.6 percent of its GDP on education. This is lower than in sub-Saharan countries like Kenya, Togo, and Zimbabwe. With schools already online now, there is enough data to suggest online school can help children of all age groups but is not an alternative to the brick and motor schools. Teachers at the country’s premier private schools are tech-savvy. Most of them have access to the internet at home, as well as the other digital infrastructure required to craft and share course material. Unfortunately, it is not the case when it comes to the vast majority of teachers in the country. Nearly one in five primary school teaching positions is vacant today. Even in better times, many schools in rural India were run by just a single teacher. Smaller schools around the country might shut down permanently. School owners will be forced to downsize and renegotiate rentals since this looks like a washout year. Private schools are faced with drastically dwindling incomes and many teachers have been laid off are on the verge of being so. Sadly, not even the government or associated institutions like NCERT and SCERTs are talking about what they could do to ease the path back to school and address the trauma and fear among teachers and children. There is also very little thought on how rural schools are expected to cope with returning workers and their families. Nor is the government showing any concern about the physical, mental and emotional state of children who have undergone the trauma of recent reverse migration. While the government has done a commendable job enforcing the lockdown, worryingly little has been said to date about the government’s education sector strategy. So far, what has been heard from government official channels is a directive preventing schools from hiking fees during the lockdown. However, instead of putting more thought for this problem the government has thought of changing the nomenclature of HRD to Ministry of Education and bringing its New Education Policy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Education lockdown<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}