The prolonged closure of schools after the sudden and totally unplanned lockdown in March 2020 to a possible re-opening at the end of September 2021 (a period of 18 months) has grabbed some media attention at last. Following the release of the Emergency Report of School Education (ERSE) based on the School Children’s Online Offline Learning (SCHOOL) Survey, conducted in August 2021, news coverage has gone beyond reproducing political handouts extolling the virtues of the New Education Policy (NEP 2020).
The key findings of the first round of the survey covered 1,362 households, and 1,362 students studying in Classes 1 to 8.
The focus was on “relatively deprived hamlets and bastis where children generally attend government schools”. It is worth noting that about one-fifth of the sampled students were studying in private schools at the time of the March lockdown.
However, many private schools tried to continue with the same fees by turning to online classes. Most parents, already suffering reduced incomes, were reluctant to pay the fees when students were staying at home and they were also required to meet additional charges under the heads of smartphones and recharges.
Further, online education did “not work well for their children” possibly because of poor connectivity (65 per cent for rural areas and 57 per cent for urban areas), an absence of a conducive environment at home and lack of unrestricted use of the family smartphone.
As a result, 26 per cent of the sampled children left private schools for government schools, and many parents claimed they were waiting for private schools to give them transfer certificates for shifting their children to government schools as well.
Almost 60 per cent of the sampled families are rural and about 60 per cent are Dalit and Adivasi. So the survey focusses on the most underprivileged and consequently its findings have turned out to be not merely “bleak” but indeed “catastrophic”.
Only 8 per cent of rural children were studying online and only 28 per cent were studying “regularly” both online and offline.
Thirty-seven per cent were not studying at all during the period of the survey. The comparable figures for urban areas were 47 per cent studying “regularly” and 19 per cent not studying at all.
Almost half the children, 42 per cent urban and 48 per cent rural, were unable to read more than a few words.
For a country proclaiming 98 per cent enrolment with governments taking credit for this achievement, these are indeed shocking figures. This educational emergency is particularly severe given the huge numbers involved.
A recent UNICEF report, Rapid Assessment of Learning During School Closures in the Context of Covid-19, (2021), states that school closures have impacted approximately 286 million children from pre-primary to upper (senior) secondary and this has added to the 6 million who were out of school even before the pandemic struck.
The disruption has been marked by the effect of sharp inequalities already entrenched in the system. Among the underprivileged, Dalit and Adivasi families are much worse off.
Only 4 per cent of rural Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes students study online on a regular basis, compared with 15 per cent of other rural children.
Forty-three per cent of S.C./S.T. students are not able to study at all, as opposed to only 25 per cent of dominant caste students.
Eighty-three per cent of S.C./S.T. parents feel that their child’s ability to read and write has declined, as opposed to 66 per cent dominant caste parents.
The example provided in the survey of Kutmu village of Latehar district (Jharkhand), records discrimination in education. Although most of the households are of Dalits and Adivasis, the teacher belongs to one of the few dominant caste families in the village. None of the Dalit and Adivasi children interviewed in Kutmu were able to read fluently and parents spoke bitterly about the irresponsible attitude of the teacher.
Increase in child labour
There is a rising incidence of child labour in the 10-14 age group and a majority of the girls are doing some household work.
In rural areas about one-fourth of the girls had also done unpaid work in family fields in the preceding three months, and a substantial 8 per cent had done some paid work.
The survey shows that an overwhelming majority of parents, including 65 per cent urban parents with “online children”, felt their child’s reading and writing abilities declined during the lockdown.
Although 44 per cent parents in urban areas felt their children had adequate online access as compared with 25 per cent in rural areas, it is significant that 46 per cent children in urban areas found online classes/videos difficult to follow, which was close to the 43 per cent rural children who felt the same.
Distance learning through TV, Doordarshan and feature phones found a dismal ‘response’ of less than 3 to 5 per cent (urban) and less than 1 per cent (rural) on an occasional basis.
Education demands much more than mere technology. It requires imagination, socialisation and sensitivity, as well as a deep respect for the constitutional principles of equality and social justice.
How the “offline children” fared
What were the conditions prevailing among the “offline children”? In the rural areas, almost half of the children who were not studying online were not studying at all during the survey. Irregularity was also a feature of their attempts at self-study, and home study with help, as well as study with classmates.
Part of the reason for this appears to be a lack of planning for providing support and engaging with students.
In some States, such as Punjab, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, an effort was made to provide for some classes in schools or mohallas, give worksheets as homework to students, and to have teachers visiting homes to advise students and parents on how to occupy students not just sometimes but regularly at home.
However, this appears not to have sustained itself too well. Only 5 per cent urban children had the teacher come home to inquire and advise; the figure was 12 per cent for rural children.
A phone call outreach was made to 36 per cent urban children but only to 12 per cent rural children. Three per cent urban children and 2 per cent rural children had a teacher come home to help. But 39 per cent urban children and 25 per cent rural children did receive homework.
Most other States, including Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, were unable to do even this much and pretty much left families and children to cope on their own.
Fifty-one per cent students in urban areas and 58 per cent in rural areas had not even met their teacher(s) in the 30 days before the survey, which generated further problems. Particularly, but not only in urban areas with confined homes, it was a “burden for children to be home” all day, and yet their wandering out-of-doors also caused anxiety.
For working mothers, the closure of schools was a source of deep concern. For the students who struggled with the need to labour on the one hand and on the other to cope with the boredom of idleness with restricted resources, phone addiction and aggression were reported by parents who were worried about growing violent reactions.
However, the survey also “uncovered an impressive range of initiatives by caring teachers”. They convened small group classes in the open or even in their homes, recharged phones or shared their own phones with students who could not afford the expenses, and even helped them with their studies through home visits. These valuable inputs were a drop in the ocean in the face of the systemic lack of concern, planning and resources.
A final blow for students and their families during the pandemic was not just the school closures but the immediate discontinuation of midday meals and the nutritional loss suffered as a result.
About 80 per cent of parents with children studying in government schools received some rice or wheat (often with complaints that the quantities distributed were less than the entitlement of 100 grammes daily per child) during the previous three months. A small minority received some cash. Others received nothing as the provisions made were both “sporadic and haphazard”.
The SCHOOL survey showed that the pandemic to a great extent exacerbated the consequences of what was already a crisis-ridden system of school education. It certainly did not create these conditions. The government school system in general has failed to provide anything like learning because the students and teachers alike are victims of a prolonged neglect.
Denied adequate investments by governments for providing infrastructure, permanent trained faculty, and support for a student population drawn from increasingly deprived and marginalised sections of society, one can only hope that the results of the SCHOOL survey will act as a major “wake-up call” to those who have either been sleeping over the system’s calamitous descent into disastrous inefficiency, or have in fact contributed to this for the benefit of just about everyone but the children of this country.
What will it mean if schools are not merely to re-open by the end of September but to actually embark on a process of renewal?
Firstly, the re-opening of lakhs of neighbourhood schools that have been “rationalised” and closed over the past three or four years. They will be needed, and there is an opportunity to revive them given the big shift to government schools seen during the pandemic.
Secondly, urgently upgrading infrastructure to come up to the prescribed norms and quality. The failure to invest in our future generations for decades must be corrected and policies aimed at depriving the education system must be immediately reversed.
Thirdly, a full complement of the trained faculty required for establishing a completely free and compulsory education system from ECCE upwards to Class XII needs to be put in place.
Fourthly, an adequate nutritional programme requires to be implemented by a trained cadre maintained specially for this task.
And finally, devising and engaging in a learning process involving faculty and students in all schools to determine how they will recognise and overcome the problems posed by the long lockout from school. This is crucial as children who are not going to school are being promoted to the next year and confronted with a higher programme of study.
A turning point?
This is an important moment and a chance for breaking out of the dysfunctional pre-pandemic mode and beginning anew. Not merely remedial but rejuvenating. Now is the time for making a sustained and serious effort at developing the long overdue process of continuous and constant evaluation.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.