While much is being said of the damage to the economy caused by Covid-19, less attention is spent on the potential loss for the future, such as the damage to the nation's human resource pool. Certain aspects of teaching and learning from home are more involved, as parental participation is more intense as they take over from the teacher to ensure that a child is learning.
This is very true for younger children whose basic skills are being cultivated and nurtured. The work is demanding for parents who are not trained as teachers. This goes on for a few years and the success or failure of the children are easily measured. As soon as they can read and have a command of arithmetic, a parent knows that they have done well. If, by the second year, the child has not learnt to read, write and count, then both child and parent are in trouble.
Learning is a skill somehow drilled into a child by the trained teacher. But can all parents achieve the skill without training? Recently, this newspaper carried a piece by a parent complaining how home-based teaching and learning (PdPR) had changed the home from a space of warmth and love to one of discipline and resistance.
As the teaching parent at home, he feels that his young children are unnecessarily challenged by too many subjects, 10 for Year One pupils. Pushback from the children is to be expected and the ensuing discipline issues can bring backlash that can change the tenor of the family, creating distance between parent and children. PdPR needs refining, not least to ensure that children do not fall behind. The parent suggests that the curriculum be confined to ensure efficacy of learning, which in the beginning should be focused on the necessary learning skills and STEM, which will determine the core of the child's learning years, to be expanded over time to encompass the whole curriculum.
Firstly, in a country where cyber accessibility remains uneven, all levels of education can unravel. It is a problem exacerbated by social class and the rural-urban divide. Without clear policies to overcome these problems, and fast, our national aspiration for First World development status will be out of reach. Singapore, for example, has proposed a future adapted to Covid-19.
Assuming it can be controlled, much of life can resume as before. But what if living with the virus is more than just flu sneezing and it remains dangerous, threatening to mutate to more effectively defeat us? Home-based learning will continue and what we currently have does not look able to wholly replace the effectiveness of school-based education. For example, a Form One student has a home-based learning that is done in three methods — online, offline and tutorials.
While supervision to minimise truancy is excellent as parent-teacher communication is constant, the intellectual depth seems shaky. That the intellectual objective of the curriculum is met is uncertain. PdPR, if adopted as a long-term teaching policy, needs some refinement. What is urgently needed is to make cyber access universal within the country. Cost of access should be controlled so that every home finds it affordable. Every home must have adequate work stations. And, first and foremost, a formulation of a suitable pedagogy for home-based education.