COVID-19 & Online Teaching in Pakistan
Amidst all this COVID-19 fervor another dilemma our education sector have been hit hard by is, ‘ONLINE TEACHING’. As we all know that our virtues are extremely low in virtual world but still we decided to embark on this mysterious journey.
The already deteriorating standards of education in Pakistan is an open secret to everyone. Teachers as well as students are least trained in handling this sector virtually and we can’t blame them as our teaching techniques were never designed that way.
So the scenario of these online classes is absurd.
First of all its making people 24 hours busy , constantly occupied on their devices and meanwhile we have to bear the blabbering of our moms and mom- in -laws, coz in most of our household its out of laws. Stumbling from app to app we have totally forgotten our long time hobby of stalking our love interests, our exes and our virtual crushes who doesn’t even know that we exist.
On the other hand the timetables have become so flexible that we can even have a class at 1 o’clock AT NIGHT, when most of our family members are dozing off in the same room in this “QUARANTINE”, and can easily take our 60 year old Sir into ‘hmmmm.. who is on the call’ guy/girl. Burping, thumping sound of breath, parents scolding during phone calls, sneezing , lazing, and all the drama that used to be in the background of the classes have come to the forefront.
We totally forgot the constant power cuts, the interruption caused by it is another matter so due to these online classes instead of being present in the class physically we also need uninterrupted electricity, stable internet connection, peace of mind, isolation, no distraction at all and when we are fighting to store some food for the family and trying to help out people in our respective communities we need to buy internet data packages. Oh! I also forgot smart phones, laptops, tabs etc, that is a must , u cannot do ‘parhai’ without it.
The huge chunk of our nation studies in government schools my question is, do they have all resources available to facilitate their students? What about those students who cannot even afford 3 times proper meals, proper sanitation and a healthy lifestyle? Aren’t we creating a rift between different strata of society? Are we not generating a sense of deprivation among them? Private schools are also trying hard to train and facilitate their teachers and students in this pandemic.
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Whereas we should motivate our generation to stay humane to the crisis faced by the whole human race instead of that we are shoving them into the complexities of things that they are not being trained off. When it is announced by the government that schools and universities will reopen on 31st May 2020 and these holidays should be taken as summer break than why all this chaos is being force fed to teachers, students and the administrative staff?
As an educationist and socialist I can’t foresee these efforts to be fruitful for our education sector. This is partial study that have imbibed stress from the ongoing situation and cannot help us in stabilizing our education system. It is a chaos within a chaos. Time to open our eyes and get out of this ‘UTOPIAN WORLD’.
