LETTERS: The Covid-19 pandemic has been a major catalyst for online learning. The current initiatives by the government and the people's call for better facilities to support online learning to ensure everyone has access have contributed to this push.
The overarching belief here is that online learning is the one and only future for our education landscape that can ensure learning will take place.
It would not be prudent at all not to recognise the vital role technology plays in human development and sustainability. It is equally imprudent to think that technology has all the answers to meet all our human needs.
To ensure learning is not disrupted, we have rushed headlong into online learning without fully ascertaining the extent to which it is necessary, for whom it is necessary and what other alternatives there are for greater educational progress.
For now, we are only addressing the most obvious concerns — "access" to education or "a learning environment that is safe enough to allow learning to take place and opportunities to learn that are equitably distributed", according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
It is this access to education upon which the education policy of the New Economic Policy mirrors. We need to learn from the past, but carefully mould it to address our present and future needs.
The need for better access involves not only those who are financially challenged, but also those who do not have the right environment to support learning, regardless of their race and ethnicity.
Thus far, we have ignored the equally important issue of learning support that our children need, especially the young and the challenged. Our approach has been too simplistic in addressing access to education, and more importantly, we have overlooked the purpose of education.
Education is more than gaining access to information, and it is certainly much more than developing human capital, which is the focus of the industrial revolution. Martin Luther King Jr in his speech in 1948 said: "The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.
"But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but no morals.
Remember, intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education."
For this, we need to have a more comprehensive approach, not a stopgap reactive measure that will eventually further segregate the haves and have nots, despite the billions of ringgit that we have committed to spending to narrow that very same gap.
We need to deeply think about the preferred future for our young. With our present strategy for the future, we are losing the sense of social responsibility and togetherness. We need to take a step back and consider an alternative and better future.
A future where the digital divide, even if it persists, does not impede real access to education, regardless of one's socio-economic status. A future where there is true and equitable access to education and where dropout rates and risky behaviours are a thing of the past.
To have this preferred future, we should not constrain ourselves into thinking that online learning is the only future that we have. We need a deep transformational change at all levels to realise the preferred future.
A change that will enable us to live by our National Philosophy of Education, one of sejahtera for all humankind.
Professor Noor Lide Abu Kassim
Kulliyyah of Education, Director of the Centre for Professional Development, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM)
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times