Over the past century, schools all over the world have come to be astonishingly homogenous, following a model with many shared architectural, organizational, and procedural features: classroom, lesson plan, timetable, age grouping, and examination, among many others. And over the past few decades, there have been more schools available around the world, enabling millions more children, youths, and adolescents to exercise their rights to an education.
School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent learning disruptions shed light on that schools’ significance go well beyond being just essential educational settings; They not only represent societies’ commitment to education as a public human activity, but also support inclusion, equity, and health and well-being of both individuals and societies as a whole they are among the few institutions that are explicitly intended to protect and provide opportunities for the most vulnerable.
Ironically, it is typically that too repeatedly perpetuates inequality; about half of the world’s secondary school graduates lack even the bare minimum levels of proficiency in basic competencies. Relevance and applicability beyond the “classroom” can be limited wherever academic learning occurs. Gender discrimination can have an impact on children’s attendance to and participation in school, particularly in times of crisis when it is deemed unsafe to do so or when greater demands are placed on girls and women’s domestic work and caregiving at home. This is in addition to the challenges for children’s learning that arise from concerns for safety, mental and physical health, adequate housing, and nutrition, amid rising temperatures, ecological degradation, and infrastructural strain, given the fact that most of the world’s schools lack the appropriate materials, architecture, and technologies to address them, all of which have been proven to adversely impact learning.
The implications of school closures and lack of in-person education will continue to have long-lasting, if not lifelong, impacts on the social, intellectual, and mental well-being of millions of young people, particularly those already vulnerable and marginalized. Schools must therefore deem it of utmost importance to protect children from gender-based violence, child marriage, and child labor, as well as to prevent early pregnancy and school dropouts.
Besides that, the learning disruptions will lead to shifting curricular and pedagogical needs, which pose challenges for the unidirectional instruction methods used in many schools — not to mention rising expectations for a variety of ways of knowing to flourish there. To meet the evolving needs, schools must therefore instead employ more participatory, relevant, and responsive curricula and pedagogies.
Curricula will be under increased pressure to meet rising demands for technological competencies following COVID-19. Schools will increasingly be expected to foster children’s engagement with the global knowledge commons, develop their technological and digital competencies, and cultivate them as digital citizens in effective, relevant, and age-appropriate ways. Schools must therefore mitigate the negative impacts of, among many other online risks, digital oversaturation, addiction, and privacy issues.
As human lifespans are extending, employment requirements are changing, and individuals are being faced with responsibilities for the world they are building for the future, the demand for lifelong education is growing; At all stages of life — from early childhood through well into adulthood —, learning environments beyond school have become increasingly needed to respond and thereby adapt to a changing world. Here are some proposals included in the Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education report of the International Commission on the Futures of Education.
The Thai government is, likewise, committed to ensuring a safe return to school for all students. With commendable efforts to provide education post-COVID-19, it has pledged to do its utmost to devise several educational initiatives to make up for the learning loss. To achieve this, prioritizing the safe reopening of schools and developing strategies to ensure that all learners return to educational institutions is crucial. Most importantly, for the future of education, the government aims to prepare and put into action strategies to secure future education, protecting it from further closures brought on by the pandemic or any other emergencies.
The government will also address all forms of educational exclusion, disparity, and inequality that are based on age, gender, and socio-economic standing, among many others. In doing so, emphasis will be placed upon encouraging those underprivileged and vulnerable — who are most at risk of not returning and who are out of school — to stay in school and prevent early school dropouts, by strengthening flexible alternative learning and equivalency programs and ensuring the health and well-being of both learners and teachers are taken care of.
Source: Transforming Education Summit 2022 (April 2022)
