Is going to school only twice a week sustainable?

It is easy for middle- and upper-class South Africans with access to schools that can accommodate social distancing and Covid protocols to begin to believe that, on the whole, except for the inconveniences of screening, masks and sanitation, education is returning to normal. 

However, nothing could be further from the truth, an education expert Dr Felicity Coughlan said. 

“Those of us with means are called to focus on the cost to the children in South Africa. It is not dramatic to say that for most of the children ‘regular’ schooling has yet to resume,” said Coughlan, director at The Independent Institute of Education. 

Coughlan said while schools and educators were doing the best they could, often with limited resources, too many children, including those in reasonably well-resourced public schools, were still attending school on a rotation basis instead of full-time, because of space constraints and the inability to ensure social distancing.

“It is understood that children learn less when stressed and that in periods of social and civil unrest, they are impacted not only by their lack of access to school but also by what happens when they are at school and the ongoing and pervasive sense of uncertainty.” 

This is where all our children are impacted. The learning conditions all children face are not optimal for the confidence and calm needed to learn best.

“We have a collective responsibility as a society to think about and act upon this situation. Some of the challenges we face are less obvious than others. On the matter of masks, for instance, science is very clear that they are a major weapon in the fight against infection, but this is not coming without cost. 

“The experience of smiling and seeing the smiles of others is not just an emotional one – it changes the way our brains work as it releases hormones of pleasure. Smiling and seeing the smiles of others physically protects us against stress and its effects. Just not seeing the smiles of your classmates is a daily cost to children.”

Coughlan noted that to address the lack of in-person teaching time, some schools were using the hours children were at school in this disrupted manner to focus intensively on maths and languages.

“This is understandable, but there is a social cost to relegating social subjects to at-home learning.

“Others are making their teachers available for hours each day to respond on WhatsApp to children – depriving exhausted teachers of recuperation time.  None of this is negligent and none of this is motivated by anything other than a desire to do the best possible. 

“We need to want to be different now, ready for that day, recognising that when that day comes, it will be another day in our collective future which is nothing like the last day any of us lived not knowing what Covid was.”