A generational crisis?

What had been, up until a few weeks ago, a fairly animated public discourse regarding the likelihood of a restart of the state-run classroom education system now appears to have undergone a lowering of its decibel level. It seems that, of late, the return to an upward movement in the number of reported cases of Covid-19 may have shredded the nerves of those who finally came to the realization that a posture of robust bravado cannot be allowed to proceed in the face of unpalatable risks.

So that what is now the likelihood of the reality of the loss of at least the remainder of the calendar year in terms of classroom tuition, appears to have eroded such diplomatic restraint as the United Nations had been applying, its Secretary General, Antonio Guterres tersely declaring last week on the direction in which he perceives the virus to be taking global education.

“The largest disruption of education ever,” Secretary General Guterres says and when account is taken of the fact that in his profession there has always been an enduring mindfulness of the virtue of restraint, diplomatically, Mr Guterres’ pronouncement is arguably the equivalent of a bombshell. He went further, asserting that the now protracted worldwide schools’ closure could well precipitate a “global catastrophe.”

It is the classical rock-and-a-hard-place scenario in which the cold facts are laid out without ever as much as a sliver of a silver lining. Students returning to school, Mr Guterres says must be a “top priority” and yet he dare not separate the normalization of classroom tuition from the Sword of Damocles manifested in a rampaging virus capable of wreaking unimaginable havoc wherever and whenever it pleases. We set the two apart at our own possible peril.

It is a reality that must of necessity be infused into the speculative guessing games on which we in Guyana had embarked over many weeks and which, now, appears to have metamorphosed into an understanding that the stakes are simply too high to treat it as though it were a matter of a wager on the country’s premier horserace.

As the number of reported cases has steadily inched forward animated insistence of the September restart has gradually been ground down by an understanding of the magnitude of the risk, so that we have had no real choice but to turn to the question as to where our education system goes now. Here, the answers are no easier to find than those that have to do with just when Covid-19 will run its course.

That is why Mr Gutteres asserts that “the single most significant step” that leaders can take towards the reopening reposes in finding a cure for the virus…and that, as he well knows, does not, even remotely, provide anything resembling

a short-term solution to the crisis in which the global education system finds itself. Simply put, it is a matter of putting first things first and in the context of the reality that confronts us the re-start of classroom tuition will have to wait.

That leaves us, nonetheless, in a mind-boggling lurch given, on the one hand, that there is not, at this time, anything remotely resembling any kind of manifestly workable formula for halting the march of the pandemic and on the other, the reality that once nothing is done we will, conceivably, be compelled to watch with mounting dismay as our civilization is progressively rolled back in the face of a meltdown in education systems across the world, moreso in countries that are already seriously retarded. This surely puts into perspective the UN Secretary General’s description of that with which we are confronted as a “generational crisis,” no less.