A COVID TEACHING MOMENT
My column in the Deccan Herald today.
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Classes, black-boards and chalk, white-boards and pens, examinations ... a lot of familiar things in the world of learning have come to a grinding halt since the onset of the Covid19 pandemic.

For a few weeks, we hoped this disruption would be short, but as the lockdown has gone on for months, we have been forced to imagine an altogether different way of doing things. Three things have been thrown up plainly by the new reality.

The most critical of these is the vast gulf between those who learn in public schools and others in private schools. The second is a conversation about the difference betn schooling and learning, which we earlier believed to be the same. And the third is the role of examinations.

For the longest time we told ourselves a school without a toilet for girls is still useful in some way, a classroom with a leaky ceiling can be used if one sat in a different corner, a school with regularly absent teachers is still doing some good when the teacher comes. Etc.

Covid has nailed all that to the mast. Now the only inputs that matter are a network connection, a computer in every student's home, and an instructor familiar with digital facilitation of learning. Either the schools provide this, or they're not schools. End of fairy tale.

And by and large, public schools aren't providing this. They simply cannot. There is no way that decades of under-investment in public education can be wished away in a summer of lockdown. All that governments can do now is watch helplessly, and the public can see this.

This is despite some slice of luck. Education departments throughout the country should thank their lucky charms that the pandemic appeared on the scene just as the school calendar was winding down. This allowed governments to simply let things slide into the summer holidays.

Let's turn to examinations next. The conventional way of conducting them has been ruled out by Covid, and the digital alternative is only for the better off. This has forced us to cancel them altogether. But if exams can be cancelled, one might ask whether we ever needed them.

Our education system never focused on learning as an opportunity for all children, and instead relied on exclusion through exams to mask its limited offering to only a few. We set up various exams and told ourselves those who didn't pass don't have merit. It's utterly unfair.

Merit is often nothing more than the accumulation of past opportunities in families. Excluding the poor through the logic of merit ignores the history that has made them poor. Instead, anyone who wants to learn should be able to, and we should figure out how to make that happen.

Govts love exams - they are the lever and trap that keep us from questioning the system's poor quality. You can't get to high school or college without clearing exams, and you can't get jobs without going to college. The threat of losing out has become the reason we lost out.

Fortunately, employers would rather hire someone whose work they are familiar with than someone whose marks sheet they've briefly seen and have no confidence in. Apprenticeships are the answer - learn-on-the-job environments can improve the learning in schools and colleges too.

Between the twin scams of poor public education and certification without learning, more people are asking, 'is schooling the only way to learn?' The state has a vested interest in the status quo, and the market isn't a solution for all children. Society will have to tackle this.

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