Should the recommendation be accepted, the committee had suggested that all COVID-19 precautions be followed. The next step now depends on the government and further the school managements that will have to assess the ground reality of the campuses before opening the gates of their schools for students.
The reasons for the expert committee to suggest reopening of schools for students from the primary section up to Class VIII (Classes IX to XII and colleges are already open) after they have been closed since March of last year, was that there has been no reported incident of increased local transmission of COVID-19 since the higher classes were reopened and that the overall test positivity rate has remained below one per cent in the past weeks. Doctors are also of the opinion that it is time children go back to their classrooms as they have missed classroom learning for 20 months already and having been exposed to only online classes these long months would be suffering psychologically.
The last of the reasons – of children suffering psychologically – is very important and has perhaps been overlooked by the teaching system in the State. Studies elsewhere have shown that the remote learning followed during the pandemic had affected children psychologically as they missed out on the school environment, of being present on physical campus, of having access to teachers, friends and classmates. Children are not used to studying in isolation and interaction was severely limited in online classes as they were not able to meet physically. Studies further show that children are more motivated to study when in the school environment rather than by remote teaching.
For many children – and these are children in the primary section who could be as young as six – going back to school could turn into another ordeal as after months of studying individually, leaving the house very infrequently or even rarely because of the pandemic, they would now have to reacquire the skills of interacting with others their own age. They might have made friends with some in kindergarten, but after a gap of almost two years, it won’t be easy for them to interact with their old friends from where they left off. It would be starting a new friendship and teachers will have to step in here to smoothen the passage for them.
Teachers too are not going to have it easy as they will be now balancing between online and offline classes simultaneously. After the abrupt change to online teaching last year – which they coped with extremely well – they now have another challenge of doing both and also gaining the confidence of their students. They will be meeting their students physically for the first time and an entire term is over. Besides that they are going to have to get their students to regain their confidence and perform as well as they did before the pandemic and before schools turned to remote teaching.
On Children’s Day, young students would perhaps be looking forward to going back to school. It is perhaps the best news for many of them that schools may soon reopen. Yet, given how the coronavirus mutated and spread infecting lakhs in Goa itself earlier this year, all pandemic precautions will have to be stringently followed. Children, one has to remember, have not been vaccinated and so have to be extra cautious. The recommendation to start schools could be good for children, but it should also keep them safe.
