The Class of 2020

The city of Visakhapatnam in north coastal Andhra Pradesh was bracing for a cyclone. The horrific gas leak at the LG Polymers plant, which left 12 dead and hundreds affected, had not yet happened. On a Tuesday morning, Uma Vegesna was preparing for a cataclysm of another kind in her living room. At 10 minutes to 9 am, she turned on the laptop and took position behind the screen, facing six-year-old Udyan Anand Samuel who was pleading to be excused from attending a Zoom class. Her head buzzing with vague anxiety, and feeling only partially in control of what was to come, she gave Udyan a little pep talk and promised to be with him throughout. A surprise test by the Environmental Sciences teacher had caught him off guard the day before and he had burst into tears after failing to answer one of five questions on the human anatomy. “He does not want any of this. If I don’t sit next to him, he would just walk away. He has lost interest even in the music and painting classes held in the evenings,” Vegesna said. The family lives about 7 kms away from the Visakhapatnam steel plant, where her husband is employed. An artist, Vegesna spends two-and-a-half hours every day trying to train little Udyan’s drifty gaze back to the 15-inch screen that has replaced the classroom. The private school, which has been marking attendance intermittently and conducting tests, won’t be breaking for summer. There was unspoken remonstration in Vegesna’s voice as she talked about how, in a live class of 35-40 children, teachers not only expected attention but enforced it. “After the third Zoom session, I received WhatsApp messages alleging that Udyan wasn’t fully involved in the class. I have been trying my best since.” Getting the child to learn the nuances of English pronunciation has proved an exercise in futility; homework has been even harder to accomplish. To cool off, mother and son spend their evenings watching the clouds from the terrace. “The upshot of the lockdown is that he hates the laptop with a vengeance.” To parents, the Covid-19 pandemic feels like a trap to catch all childhood. Karnataka’s state Minister for Education S Suresh Kumar has in fact called for reducing the burden on children by paring down the syllabus and dispensing with “needless online classes”.

As they wait out the pandemic, high school and senior school students continue to be chained to the imperatives for standardised achievement even in an extraordinary year. With India looking to restart the new academic calender in August-September, schools have made online classes de rigueur—as much to justify their fees as to keep in touch with students. When I log on to a history lesson meant for class 9 students of a private high school in north Bangalore, time seems to tick so slowly I can almost see the minutes floating in the air, going nowhere. The 28 students are muted out as a sari-clad teacher cuts Louis XVI down to size—a four-minute biography as dull as his personality. The emotional flatness of the class is broken by the occasional frisson of excitement rippling through almost unnoticed. I tentatively ping Tarun (last name withheld) on WhatsApp, where, it turns out, the cool kids hang out during live classes while keeping a poker face for the camera. I eavesdrop on a snarky chat about the teacher’s loyalty to an outdated guide book and lose track of how the conversation segues into a Noah Centineo fan fest. “I don’t zone out like this in math class where every bit is important, but with other subjects, it’s like a boring speech,” says Laila (name changed). “There is no recognition or interaction, we don’t feel seen or understood. It is better to watch videos on Byju’s and other learning apps at our own pace.” Absent any certainty about when schools will open, students have been signing up in droves on online learning platforms like Byju’s, Toppr and upGrad, which have temporarily made much of their content available for free in the hope of capitalising on a larger user base in the coming months. Education in a narrow sense is within reach, more so than ever before, but the decoupling of learning from the intimacy and the freedom of a school environment may take the system further from a complex notion of what it means to teach.

Instagram is the new school hallway, says Sai Harsha Pingali, a 16-year-old student at the Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, branch of Narayana Junior College, a brand of institutions notorious for their heavy-duty, regimented, Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)-centric teaching. He uses up his entire daily data allowance—1.5 GB—on four hours of online classes, and must mooch off his father’s internet for social media and movies. The only consolation: JEE Main and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) have been postponed to July and Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal has indicated that there would be a proportionate reduction in the curriculum due to the loss of valuable instructional time. “Online classes just don’t cut it when it comes to competitive preparation. My school has clubbed three sections together to enable teachers to address over 200 students at once, and this was acceptable until now, when we were only revising the Class 11 syllabus. Today was the first lesson from the Class 12 curriculum–math–and it was not very effective,” says Sharma. Due to network issues, he had missed out on a couple of introductory points about indefinite integrals that he couldn’t get out of his head until the end of the session. And even then, all he could do was send a text to the teacher seeking clarifications over a phone call. Distance may have impacted student engagement, but it hasn’t come in the way of the school’s demand for an immediate downpayment of Rs 20,000 towards the Rs 75,000 it charges in yearly fees—up by Rs 5,000 since last year. Last month, the Delhi High Court, disposing of a plea to bar private schools from charging tuition fee for the period that they must remain closed, noted that charging tuition was justified as most schools were conducting classes online. It added, however, that schools cannot deny access to educational facilities due to non-payment of fees or levy any new charges.

A remote learning community is built on real time, synchronous, two-way, audio-video channels of communication and most schools do not have the human and technological infrastructure for such teaching. Prasanna VR, CEO of Sikshana Foundation, whose learning modules are deployed across 48,000 Government schools in Karnataka, says a long gap could result in an alarming drop in baseline learning across ages. “Many children struggle to catch up even after summer break. If government schools remain shut for four-five months, the consequences could be serious. As on today, only the private sector has the means to conduct online classes,” he says. Karnataka was ranked third in the country in the first School Education Quality Index (SEQI) and ranking of the states released by the NITI Aayog in October 2019, but the year 2020 could bring with it a fresh set of challenges for the state education system. To maintain learning levels, the government should start with opening smaller schools catering to 20-30 children, Prasanna says. “Our workbooks are printed and ready to be distributed. We could ask children to come to school to collect resources and reward them for positive learning outcomes so that they continue to study at home. We cannot possibly cover the whole syllabus this year, so it’s the effort that should count.”

“Children attending government schools will suffer in a big way, there is no doubt about that,” says R Karthikeyan, 29, a teacher since 2014 at the Government Higher Secondary School in Arasunilaipalayam, Tiruchirapalli district, Tamil Nadu. “Government school teachers have a very limited role that does not extend beyond the physical classroom. We don’t know what our students do at home, we cannot even enforce parental attendance at PTA meetings. The only way we know we can boost the pass percentage is by spending more time in the classroom. If we can’t do that now, we are doomed,” he says. The Class 10 pass percentage at the school last year was 88, up from 64 the year before, thanks to special evening classes, Karthikeyan says. With Tamil Nadu now deciding to hold board examinations for Class 10 from June 1st to 12, he fears government school children have little hope of scoring well. The 550 students at the school come from villages within a 10-km radius, either by bus or on cycles. The familiar sight of buses pulling up one after another at 8.50 am, disgorging anywhere between 60-80 children per vehicle, seems unthinkable now, Karthikeyan says. “How can you follow social distancing at a school like ours?” At least once a week, he chats up some of his students on Jitsi Meet, a free video conferencing app that is popular in areas where 4G networks are flaky. “We talk about life under lockdown. I ask them to stay in touch with studies and to reach out if they need help–beyond that, one cannot do much. It’s up to them.”

“The myth that learning is the result of teaching is being shattered, and schools are struggling to come to terms with their redundancy,” says a Bengaluru-based lawyer whose two children, aged 12 and 15, attend one of the top schools in the city. “I am considering home schooling my kids at least for the next year.” When the academic year resumes, the risk of contagion would not only put parents on the edge, it would also carry legal implications for schools, points out Lt Gen (Retd) Arjun Ray, CEO of the Indus Trust, which runs international schools in Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad, besides early learning centres, and junior and community schools. “We are ready with back-to-school plans, and have tied up with a reputed hospital to put policies and infrastructure in place–this means not just social distancing in the classroom, but also health checks in the bus, and before students enter the school environment. Until a vaccine is ready, we cannot rule out a second pandemic,” he says. “The Government will have to lay down provisions to provide legal immunity to schools. Children go through many touch points before they arrive at school, and if a school ends up becoming a containment zone, that is the end of the brand.” The Indus Schools will continue to offer online classes and adopt a hybrid learning model going forward, he adds. “Children are digital natives. It is the teachers who have to adapt to online classrooms. The only alternative is the devil’s alternative.”

Examinations under the International Baccalaureate programme stand cancelled for the year. Several state education boards, too, have decided to promote students to Class 11 based on marks scored in pre-board examinations. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), whose exams for classes 10 and 12 were disrupted midway in March, now plans to conduct the pending ones in the first two weeks of July with social distancing protocols in place even as experts estimate that the number of Covid-19 cases in India may peak in June-July. The Board has also kicked off the evaluation of over 25 million answer sheets from the exams held in March.

The inner lives of students who have been put in a state of limbo are marred by moments of anxiety: some are staring at a gap year and others who had made plans to go overseas for further studies weigh their options. Ahana Nagarali, a Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) aspirant from Bangalore, fears she may have to put off her plans to pursue an undergraduate law degree from one of the best colleges in the country. “The exam stands postponed and the date hasn’t been announced. Covid-19 has given us more time to prepare, but it has also left parents worried about sending children off to study far from home,” says Nagarali, who has applied for internships in business research and social media marketing in the meantime.

At Hyderabad’s Osmania University, student hostels may not reopen until after September, says former Vice-Chancellor S Ramachandram. “This is an opportunity to pivot to a blended learning model. Online teaching can yield better learning outcomes but only if the content is excellent. When you teach, it is confined to a classroom, but when you record a talk, students will compare it with the best on the internet. And I do believe that much of online learning needs to be the asynchronous kind that is downloadable at low internet speeds,” he says. Most OU faculty have adapted swiftly, he says, and there is healthy competition, but not everyone has come to terms with how teaching culture needs to evolve post-Covid. “It is easy enough to give a lecture and disappear from the scene—to repeat the same thing over and over every semester. What we hope to do is to quickly train faculty so that when we reopen, they only have to come to class for mentoring students—something that is absent today. All of the teaching can move online.”

“People don’t realise that when they teach online, they are addressing an audience of one—it’s like personal tuition, for want of a better term. Those who are unable to rise to the occasion would of course be cast out of the system, but faculty who are confident in their skills now have a second career,” says Pramath Raj Sinha, co-founder of the Indian School of Business and Ashoka University. Sinha, who saw 9/11 bring new perspective to academic communities, says Covid-19 presents an inflection point that could force recruiters to focus on skills rather than on degrees. “When the printed word first came out, people said no one could possibly learn from a book. And books went on to completely change the course of education. Of course there are those who only read the cover, but even if only 50 per cent of the intended audience reads the whole book, we have already expanded the circle of learning from the few students sitting with a guru under the tree,” says Sinha, whose newest venture, Harappa Education, offers online learning modules on critical thinking, deep reading, writing proficiency and other career-oriented skills. In an informal survey Sinha conducted among 200 working professionals on the impact of the lockdown, respondents reported spending at least two more hours per week on online learning than before. “The intent is self-reported but the fact that so many people are committing to more time spent learning online is significant. Behaviours are changing,” he says.

With the great social leveller that is the classroom now out of bounds, the less privileged with little or no access to online learning resources could easily fall through the cracks. “True democratisation of knowledge cannot happen over the internet alone,” says R Shailesh Reddy, CEO, T-SAT, the Telangana government’s satellite-based education network. T-SAT, which has over 6,000 hours of original content, transmits over cable, thereby potentially reaching 600,000 homes across the state. “There has been renewed interest in school and competitive exam-oriented educational content since the lockdown. We also have an app that has been downloaded by 2 lakh users and we have 4 lakh subscribers on YouTube, totalling 50 million views.” T-SAT has been working on improving the aesthetics of its content, with teachers now using a digital board so their backs don’t have to face viewers. “The other change we want to bring is to add more English-medium content. Most small-town children now attend English-medium schools, so this is a focus area for us,” Reddy says. T-SAT is also making an effort to encourage interaction by opening up the option to make calls for live lessons.

Nalla Snigdha Reddy, a 15-year-old student at the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS) School in Saroornagar, Hyderabad, relies largely on T-SAT lectures these days. With only 100 MB a day of 4G on her Airtel mobile, data is precious—to be saved for conversations over WhatsApp with schoolmates and teachers. The TSWREIS schools, which are learning rather than assessment based, have been lauded for raising a generation of confident, English-speaking children from underprivileged communities and priming them for successful careers. Since the schools locked down in March, the TSWREIS has launched an educational app called OAKS (Online Adaptive Knowledge System) to supplement T-SAT lessons. The app pushes daily video content and assignments to help students learn systematically—especially math and science—and Snigdha uses her father’s mobile data to access them. Her father, a driver, has stayed home for the duration of the lockdown, and so has her mother, a work-from-home tailor. “The only things I miss are my friends and going to summer camp—I was hoping to go to a shooting camp this year,” says Snigdha, over a call from her home in Hastinapuram, Hyderabad, after wrapping up the day’s homework.

With incomes drying up, private tutors and coaching institutes are preparing for a lean year. “March is when we get busy enrolling new students for the next academic year. We plan our capital expenses and investments during this time,” says Sunil Angra, 48, who runs Nischay Academy, a coaching institute, out of a 1,200-sqft space in Vikaspuri, West Delhi. In the teaching business for three decades now, Angra, with his wife Geeta—whom he refers to as ‘ma’am’—coaches about 200-250 students in a year, most of whom tend to continue with the academy till the end of their schooldays. “No one has signed up but we are hoping registrations will pick up this month. For whoever wants to attend classes, I continue to do live Zoom sessions, and I don’t mute anyone out.” In a competitive unorganised industry spanning behemoths like Aakash Institute and the neighbourhood auntie teaching in her dining room, Angra falls somewhere in the middle. Monthly expenses of Rs 1.2 lakh, and a Rs 55,000 EMI for a flat he bought last year are eating into his savings, but he is hopeful business will come around. “With schools making Zoom classes compulsory, students don’t want to sit in front of a laptop all day long. I am offering lessons for free as of now—instead of my usual Rs 2,000 a month per subject,” says Angra, who teaches physics and math and hires half a dozen others to cover the other subjects for classes 9 through 12. “Padhane ki buri aadat hai (I have a bad habit of teaching),” he says. “Right now, grades are the only motivation children have. But a change may be imminent.”

Post Covid-19, the education system would be born anew, says Pramath Raj Sinha. “Imagine what this other world would look like. You would no longer be limited by the time you spend on campus. Life-long learning could truly become a reality. And students who realise this would self-select themselves,” he says. “I believe this could turn out to be a great moment where India leads the world.”

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