Access to Education during a Pandemic
“It doesn’t do me any good to not go to school. I feel like something in me is missing.”
These are the words of Céleste, a 15-year-old girl living in the Central African Republic, that would ring true for any student around the globe.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents.
While being a student myself and having to accommodate to the new ways of learning, I never realized the various ways in which my situation was a privilege. Hence, here’s taking a close look at exactly how difficult it has been for many to access one of the most basic rights — education.
India’s Scenario
When the issue is that of equitable access — India is infamous for its wealth gap. That is, of the 320 million learners calling India home, a significant percentage does not have the same access to digital facilities as their more privileged peers do. This disparity is further widened by the digital divide between urban and rural India, leading to issues with consistency and quality of learning.
With the COVID-19 crisis, the inequities and challenges that already plagued our education system, has been exacerbated by the unprecedented closure of existing educational institutions. As a result, e-learning has been on the rise during the pandemic.
However, while the online pedagogy is more beneficial than offline education in many ways, it cannot be adopted as the latter’s replacement for all of India. This is because in many parts of India, the digital medium cannot completely replicate the uniformity, attention and interpersonal interactions that the schools facilitated. Secondly, it is very challenging to ensure quality education to learners during the pandemic. Learning losses affect the low-income students disproportionately more than the others.
With lockdowns imminent due to the second wave of COVID-19 cases, understanding these challenges is the key to solving them for better crisis management in education. An efficient and safe plan for the students’ eventual return to school is very important as, for a majority of young school children across the country, it is not a luxury but a non-negotiable necessity.
The Worldwide Scenario
The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought attention to the stark inequities in public education, worldwide. Schools closed in 191 countries, affecting 1.5 billion students and 63 million primary and secondary school teachers. Half of students did not have access to a computer, and 40% did not have internet access.
After schools closed, hundreds of millions of students experienced a dramatic shift to distance learning, with physical classrooms replaced by radios, televisions, cellphones, tablets, and computers. This resulted in an overwhelming dependence and need for affordable & reliable connectivity, adequate devices, and the capability to use these technologies safely and confidently.
But quite unfortunately, statistics indicated that a total of 56 million children live in areas that are not served by mobile networks — for example, in sub-Saharan Africa. Even in developed nations, like in the United States, about 7 million school-aged children were in homes without home internet service.
Analyzing Present Challenges
Reading about the various challenges to equal access to education has been eye-opening to me. It is difficult to fathom just in how many ways, something as basic as learning can be so difficult to acquire, for so many. Most of these obstacles are either socio-economic or technical in nature.
Gender-based Inequalities: The pandemic increased the gap between girls’ and boys’ ability to access essential services, including remote education, due to lack of internet access. In low- and middle-income countries, 300 million fewer females than males have mobile internet access. Furthermore, lockdowns and the resultant loss of income for many families (including those already living in poverty before the pandemic) have placed millions of girls at immediate risk of labor exploitation, hunger, and child marriage and other forms of gender-based violence, which could force many of them to abandon school. In fact, over 767 million girls and young women were out of school at the peak of the pandemic.
Economic inequalities: During the pandemic, children living in poverty had greater difficulty accessing an education for multiple reasons, many of which occur simultaneously, creating overlaying factors of disadvantage. They were less likely to possess the necessary devices and afford internet for online distance learning. Moreover, low-income families are more likely to rely on the labor of their children to help support the family, either through the children beginning paid work.
“Students who cannot afford internet are simply deprived of the right to education.”
Lack of Electricity: Many distance learning solutions rely on radios, televisions, telephones, or the internet to deliver content. In places where infrastructure has been destroyed, damaged, or never built, the absence of electricity has prevented most means of remote learning.
Unaffordable Internet: With the half of the world’s population unable to connect to the internet, the pandemic reinforced the greatest barrier to access: affordability. Children missed classes when their parents could not afford to pay for internet access. In April 2020, UNESCO calculated that lack of internet at home excluded 706 million students―43 percent of the global student population―from online learning.
Unreliable Internet: The speed and quality of internet is as important to overcoming digital divides as providing affordable access. For children living in areas with poor connectivity, unreliable internet services significantly diminished the quality of education and their ability to learn online.
“People need food, people need security, people need healthcare, and in terms of education, students need internet.”
Lack of Teaching Resources: Many teachers were expected to continue teaching during school closures, but many were not provided with financial assistance or the necessary equipment to deliver remote learning. Instead they were expected to finance it themselves.
Digital Literacy: The abrupt, mass shift to online learning exposed wide gaps in digital literacy among students, parents, and teachers. Those unfamiliar with using technology, or with creating content with it, found the transition challenging. Other children with some digital literacy and access struggled with the risks of spending extended, unstructured time online.
How does the future look?
Many countries and schools had shifted to online learning during school closures as a stop-gap measure for the COVID-19 crisis. However, children who were the least likely to have availability, accessibility, or usability were more likely to be shut out of learning during this time, in turn widening the deep educational inequalities they already faced.
What has been made clear through this pandemic is, the importance of disseminating knowledge across borders, companies, and all parts of society. Since online learning technology plays a huge role here, it is necessary for all of us, to help others in exploring its full potential.
This is because, every child has the right to receive an education of good quality.
For that, education should be adaptable. It should be flexible to the changing needs of societies & communities, and responding to the changing needs of students. In this situation, teachers around the world, believe that access to the internet has become a prerequisite for education. But with education systems around the world reopening again fully or partially, millions of children face a radically transformed educational experience that gives them little time to adjust and perform well, simultaneously.
As COVID-19 cases rise and fall during the months ahead and countries rebuild & reinvent themselves in response to the pandemic, the chaos is only set to grow.
But there lies our opportunity — the one positive aspect of it all. That this huge tragedy is also an equally big, unifying force. It has already pushed us all to try to overcome the remaining global educational challenges, sooner than any of us could expect. In our support to quality education for all, sometimes the least we can do is be aware. Becoming aware, and spreading awareness about these issues can go a long way in building compassion, sensitivity and empathy amongst us.
It could even encourage us to go the extra mile — by extending a helping hand to those who need it.
