COVID-19 is a big disruptor. When the world went into lockdown, some 1.6 billion students missed out on their education, according to a World Bank report.
In another estimate, this time that of the World Economic Forum, 272 billion days of learning were lost or disrupted last year. Being very much a brick-and-mortar world, education is a face-to-face thing.
Going to school means literally going to school. Things changed when the pandemic shut the world down. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
As of yesterday, school time means screen time, at least in Malaysia, as Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin put education on TV nationwide.
Called DidikTV KPM, the dedicated education channel — a first in Malaysia — will be zoomed into homes. What was a two-hour slot is now a full education channel. The idea is a very simple one. If you can't go to school, the school will be made to come to you.
DidikTV KPM is taking screen teaching to another level, from 7-12. No school can remain open that long. This isn't the only big plus. The channel is accessible without cable subscription.
Call it free education on air. In 2019, there were eight million households. The television penetration rate in the same year for the country was 98.6 per cent, according to the Department of Statistics. This is an almost everyone has a TV situation.
But still, a 1.4 percentage point gap is still some people without TV sets. While waiting for TV sets to be rushed to them, education on radio is a good option.
Hearing may not be the same as seeing, but it is still education. City dwellers may not be radio fans, but those who are in greener pastures depend on them. Radio learning has always been good for remote learning.
There, video finds it hard to kill the radio star. TV-radio education combo isn't a bad idea at all to deliver students some permutations of teaching and learning.
A visual-audio play is good for some minds, too, as not all of us are visual people.
A good positive of the DidikTV KPM, if done well, is that it can reduce the negative impact of Covid-19, by making up for the school closure deficit.
Unattended to, young minds can easily go to waste. This isn't just a personal waste. It will add up to a national waste. A 63-year-old nation struggling for some years to get out of the middle income trap can't afford to let young minds go idle thus.
The possibility of schools remaining shut for sometime can't be dismissed either. What with our infections rate staying at four-digits for sometime now.
Fatalities, too, is just shy of a thousand. As SARS-CoV-2 mutates into thousands of variants, with infectivity and lethality growing as they multiply, public health experts are pointing to the pandemic becoming endemic.
This means one of two things. Either it is back to school with annual jabs or education on air for long. Idling the mind is never an option.
Although no study has been done here on the economic cost of lost learning due to school closures, an English estimate done by the London School of Economics for the state sector alone drives home the point: £1 billion per week based on £50 billion per year of government expenditure.
It is good that Malaysia has made an early start by putting education on TV. Perfecting it is just a case of fine-tuning.