It’s time to talk about the future
IT IS easy for middle- and upper-class South Africans with access to schools that can accommodate social distancing and Covid-19 protocols to begin to believe that, on the whole, except for the inconveniences of screening, masks and sanitation, education is returning to normal. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Those of us with means are called to focus on the cost – the long-term cost and impact – to children in South Africa. It is not dramatic to say that “regular” schooling has yet to resume for most children.
While schools and educators are doing the best they can, often with limited resources, many children, including those in reasonably well-resourced public schools, are still attending school on a rotation basis instead of full-time, because of space constraints and the inability to ensure social distancing.
It is understood that children learn less when stressed, and that in periods of social and civil unrest, they are impacted not only by their lack of access to school, but also by what happens when they are at school, and the ongoing and pervasive sense of uncertainty. This is where all our children are impacted. The learning conditions children face are not optimal for the confidence and calm needed to learn best. We have a collective responsibility as a society to think about and act upon this situation.
Some of the challenges we face are less obvious than others. On the matter of masks, for instance, science is clear that they are a major weapon in the fight against infection, but this is not without cost. The experience of smiling and seeing the smiles of others is not only an emotional one – it changes the way our brains work, as it releases hormones of pleasure.
Smiling and seeing the smiles of others physically protects us against stress and its effects. Not seeing the smiles of your classmates is a daily cost to children.
Learning mathematics is another example. It is a cumulative process, and missing a step has long-term consequences. If you are at school only three days out of five, or every second week, there is no consistency in the learning process. Schools are being innovative and restructuring much of what they do to cope with this, and they need to be commended for it, but each solution we put in place in these times has a cost and a consequence.
To address the lack of in-person teaching time, some schools are using the hours children are at school to focus intensively on maths and languages. This is understandable, but there is a social cost to relegating social subjects to at-home learning. Others are sending a great deal of work home, which is fine if you understand the work to begin with, but if not, that only compounds the problem.
Others are making their teachers available for hours each day to respond on WhatsApp to children – depriving exhausted teachers of recuperation time. None of this is negligent and none of this is motivated by anything other than a desire to do the best possible. The problem is that the best possible is simply not good enough, for two reasons. One is that it is contrary to what we understand about the way people best learn and interact.
This would not be as serious if these were solutions to short-term problems only. Sums and smiling – these seem trivial issues that we can deal with when things return to normal. And therein lies the problem – these are only indicators of what makes us effective as humans. In our complicated world, where what was is never going to come back, they are anything but simple or trivial.
We are not going back to a pre-Covid-19 world. Even if the vaccination programme does work, future pandemics are not the domain of doomsayers only. And even if we are eventually able to smile at each other again at school without masks, the experience of being deprived of the some of the essentials of human engagement is already etched in our bodies and psyches.
We are already a violent and disconnected society, plagued by poverty and despair. When we overlay that with the long-term impact of this current anxiety, the educational disruption of all our young people, a faltering economy and a world reverting to nationalistic tendencies, the future is truly frightening.
It is common cause that counselling services and professionals are reporting increased case loads. Are we just going to add these numbers and the increased rate of youth suicide to our statistics of living in the pandemic? Are we just going to lower our literacy and numeracy expectations even further? Or can we work collectively to fill the gaps and fix the fissures?
We have to ask ourselves – as corporates, as parents, as the public broadcaster, as provincial departments and as universities – what role can we play to ameliorate the impact of this pandemic on the sums and smiles of all our children? We have long had an unequal playing field for South Africa’s less privileged children.
Not only has the gap widened, but the nature of the impact of this pandemic has put pressure on all parts of all systems all the time.
Approaching halfway through our second year of the pandemic, your average 10-year-old, even those who are at school every day, still is not actually at school pursuing their educational journey in the way we know it needs to be. Humans are ingenious – if we want to, we can figure it out.
We need to listen with care and respect to the teachers who truly understand the impact of all of this on sums and smiles, and we need to harness and spread the goodwill, the excellence and the solutions and new ways of thinking and being that they offer. To do this we have to accept that we are not waiting for the pandemic to be over as if there is a day on which this will end.
We need to want to be different now, ready for that day, recognising that when that day comes, it will be another day in our collective future which is nothing like the last day any of us lived not knowing what Covid19 was.
And if we do not accept that we must change and not wait for things around us to change, we will be judged accordingly by the state of sums and smiles of the next generation.