Daily Times

Children who seek essential learning by schooling, are gradually being deprived opportunities for growth and development by constant school closure. The magnitude of losses related to the current school closure in Sindh is hard to tell, the cost will probably be high across the country. Some of the technical consequences may also be related to online learning.

The mysterious Corona has hit education hard worldwide. As of March 2020, school closures affected billions of learners across the globe. Prolonged school closure due to the current pandemic has caused serious setbacks to the effort to provide education for all. As lockdowns accross the globe were enforced, found an uptick in mental-health issues during the pandemic.

Responding to the Sindh government’s recent division about school reopening, Pervez Haroon, Chairman, Pakistan Private Schools Association Sindh, told Dailytimes that the government has been “unfair” towards the schools. Unjustified ordering us to keep schools closed is not only a clear violation of Article 18 and 25 of the Constitution of Pakistan. The Article allows us to freely carry on with our work or business to earn our living. But, unfortunately, despite being responsible tax payer citizens, the government has imposed restrictions and even is not ready to pay compensation to us during the schools closure. This discriminatory attitude is not only forcing schools’ owners to burn down their schools but also leading to frustrated teachers committing suicides.

Vice President, Pakistan Private Schools Association Korangi Town Karachi and the owner of Scholars Schooling System, Imran Saeed told Dailytimes that educating children has become a crime. If so, we are challenge the Sindh government to arrest us because we are not going to back off from doing our duty now and will keeping protests staged.

The challenges apply to online-schooling in developing countries is also confirmed in different surveys studying the impact of prolonged school closures, whereby a majority of the children did not maintain their education through online learning activities. Although, many high-income parents have moved towards online classes but, on the other hand it was unfeasible for many low-income parents and at the result of this a large share of the children couldn’t engage in any form of online-schooling during the school closure.

During the closure, however schools administrations and patents have tried their best to go on online-learning programme but to no avail, because In a country like Pakistan where institutions & companies behave like a mafia, the move to online-learning prompted by school closures have been exposed to be a complete failure proving uninterrupted services to the consumers. Another aspect of online learning’s failure is unavailability of resources among the people who are poor, live from hand to mouth are less likely to have access to enough resources.They don’t have a desktop or laptop computer or smartphone at home on which to follow their online classes.

The shaky situation regarding school reopening has made many parents worried. While being out of school might also negatively affect kids socially, emotionally, and cognitively. A psychiatrist told Dailytimes that We can’t know exactly what the long-term psychological impact on children, parents and teachers might be, there is some evidence that being out of school could take a toll on all school related stakeholders’ emotional well-being which may experience emotional distress & anxiety that could affect them for the rest of their lives.

While in this context online classes method is less likely to produce lasting results and most of children in suburbs may still give up on education if traditional classrooms don’t reopen soon.