The most adorable place for school-goers is school, a very place where they avail the process of learning, social inclusiveness growth and maturation. A space where school-kids remain engaged with unleashing the fullest possible development for living morally, creatively, and of course productively in a constructive setting. Indeed, a school means what not for the learners!
The school-age is predicted to conceive socialization, form patterned behavior, and most importantly to be configured with trustworthy companionship of the same age groups. At this stage, emotional and intellectual wellbeing is significantly settled and even potently shuffled through the interactions of peer learners, candid amity, and mutual interactions amongst students and teachers. So, right schooling justifies the realm of maturity, understanding, perception and compassion simultaneously. In that sense, it is obvious that what physical classrooms can afford for the school-learners virtual classrooms never can.
In the school environment our kids not only learn but also play, have run and fun, explore latent potential, produce cheerful noise, gossip together and perform other pertinent activities which provide them with the opportunity for sustaining true maturity and intellectual betterment. And thus it opens the window of opportunity for broadening their insight and future life perspective. Alternatively, the mere display of predefined lessons on screen or the continuation of distance learning might not practically cut back the total learning gap of the learners induced by extended school closure. Nothing can meet the already created learning loss by any means but getting them back to school premises can for sure.
The key support and core aspiration for which our school-kids have been waiting eagerly for a long time is to return them back to the classrooms. In the classroom environment teachers and students, in practical, reciprocally and sincerely approach in the process of imparting knowledge where physical presence of both is considered vital. Even teachers, in the classrooms, learn from the students in a sophisticated manner. That is why school is an indispensable space that is designated to render and share knowledge between teachers and students through interactive and reciprocal modality.
In fact the accumulated learning loss is a huge issue during the ongoing pandemic. More importantly the kids are deprived of being nourished intellectually and emotionally, a gap of which might not be mitigated so far. A formal opportunity for education in a school is not sheer a process where teachers teach the learners about what textbooks contain, but they do mentor students, shape their thinking process, and augment factual perception ability. As our beloved kids have been experiencing prolonged closure, this situation has forcefully affected their intellectual wellbeing. Even the timely move for online class using technologies will not fulfill their psychological need, not fill the wound of what has been rooted in their mindset.
For the learners, the outbreak of Covid-19 has shifted their daily time schedule, working fixtures, fabricated them melancholy, turned them addicted to screen as an alternative means to cope up with the lengthy leisure which has ultimately originated an acute screen dependency. On the contrary, many school-goers have lost the zeal in many, as this stagnant circumstance has conveyed impacts on molding them socio-psychologically and intellectually vulnerable and shocked as well.
Even the majority parents have negative feedback to this lengthened school closure as many of them have already been exhausted with this unusual postponement. Working parents, on the whole, are not able to apportion quality time to their adolescent kids and this proximity gap and deprivation have turned up boomerangs in some contexts.
Meanwhile, some social maladies have brought in daylight because of lengthy school adjournment. There is an alarming rise of school dropout, juvenile delinquency, child marriage, child labor, child abuse, anti-social, misappropriate and deviant behaviors as the educational institutions are shut nearly for a year. It could lead to irreparable negative effects for the future of the school-kids.
Most of the school-goers are in their adolescent period, the crucial time for reshaping their physical and mental state. Now they need to have ample opportunities for blooming properly. It is obvious that an uncultured, stunted and idle mind is a much greater destructive force. Hence our think-tanks need to think over the future of millions of school-goers to provide them with mental comfort and bring them back to their beloved rooms where they want to stay most of their day time, and regain relief too. Nobody can rob kids of their emotional attachment regarding their schooling.
Tension along with stress is gradually escalating among students and guardians for the time being as the outbreak of Covid-19 destined a murky scenario for the entire educational institutions in the country. Therefore, consideration of reopening school should be the highest priority in this unbidden situation. So, the blueprint of reopening plans is very urgent whatever the projection has been made by the concerned quarters, they need to head towards opening educational institutions too soon. We hope the complexities our beloved school-kids have been enduring with, shall be eased shortly.
(Mr. Khan is a teaching professional and academic coordinator for kids)
