Corona: Rethinking future of education

Anyone who studied development economics in higher education must have come across Micheal Todaro and Stephen Smith in their text, Economic Development.
Annoying as it was to carry the huge volume, there was minimum chance of escaping this text. One of the things I remember quite vividly was the argument for health and education as joint investments for development. That it made little sense to invest in one without the other.

They argued that health and education were very closely related in economic development. First, greater health capital may improve return to investment in education, in part because health is an important factor in school attendance and the formal learning process of a child, while a longer life raises the return on investments in education.
Second, that greater education capital may improve the return to investments in health, because many health programmes rely on basic skills often learned at school, including personal hygiene and sanitation.
Education and health are also seen as social rights enjoyable by all under the International Convention for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

So much is happening due to Covid-19 that our education sector is taking a real beating, maybe already in a crisis that we are just refusing to acknowledge. I am more concerned about higher education. It may seem while we have often been concerned about health and education together, now health is getting a lot of concerns while education is literally on the back seat, and may be so for a long time.
We cannot dispute the risks that Covid-19 poses for children in schools, that has seen higher education come to a standstill. There is no doubt schools or universities present a huge challenge for social distancing, one method in the prevention of Covid-19. Yet, that higher education which has greater latitude to experiment is equally lumped with nursery schools where children may have difficult paying attention is the real sad part.

It is a brief relief that a technical committee has been appointed to look into matters of education going forward, chaired by Dr Jane Egau, an educationist of great accomplishments and many firsts. She has a good head.
The real tasks for Dr Egau and her team though, is to disaggregate the educational groups and not treat them as a single unit or sector. It is nice that the team has representation from National Council of Higher Education and also Ministry of ICT. What we are eager to learn is how this committee finds ground for the creation of educational future that works for majority Ugandans.
Most of my friends have been home-schooling their children. Some have bought Ipads for their children to take charge of their learning. In short, there are children who have not missed much.

Yet, there are children who even if they had a radio given to them, in Primary Three, they are unlikely to sit at home on their own and comprehend what is on radio. Their parents may be illiterate. These are deep things. How does that system deal with educational opportunity inequality widened by Covid-19 in a few months? Can measures ensure that this gap, including gender ones, are not further widened?
One sympathises with the majority of learners, for whom what we are discussing is beyond comprehension to them and their parents. They may as well drop out and never think about school again.
As they say, that every cloud has its silver lining. Perhaps this is our chance, as the children are sitting at home, for educational administrators and policy makers to be on their feet, working harder than before, thinking through the future of education in this country.

There are many things that need re-thinking. There are issues of infrastructure required such as the Internet and computers to enable a new type of learning, who finances them? There are issues of curriculum, how fast can they be transformed into blended learning curriculum, especially in higher education? There are issues of educational distribution, where are our learners and what are their chances to learn? Most importantly, there are issues of educators – what skillsets do they have to teach on radio or television or run on digital pedagogy? What about investment in research?

We have already lost so much time. One hopes that this time lost will be transformed into creating a better learning system. There is no way we can imagine going back to the old way of learning. Not everything was perfect with the old way. Some things are not worth going back to. This is the time as Rudmik Thomas says, to become imaginal and see and create the future of education that works. There is no way this future of education will be directly related to the past as we know it. So much is changing before our eyes. What we do now determines if the sector survives. As we invest in health, let us remember that education is its twin sister.