Homework online. There were times that annual examination report was a sought-after document by the head of the family; father at the end of the educational session. It was once in the year activity; not round the year.
Today multiple software like Edmodo, Seesaw and online portals of large educational systems offer the parents with alternate monitoring system. Now a ward is monitored and looked at round year by the teachers as well as parents alike. While that aspect of educational monitoring must have relieved the system of much paperwork; infact it has been a tradeoff, between almirahs full of result cards and a server complete with Gigabytes of similar data. While that superficial transformation might click many forward-looking minds; the end result has been that an individual is now more entangled by information availability and his freedom of action is critically at stake.
Today a school teacher work does not stop at afternoon when he or she returns home. At most in bygone era; checking a few copies might not have been bothersome activity. At most the same had to be entered in the large registers. No; now a teacher has to make sure that the marksheet, the comments and assessment of each student is entered after logging on to the server of the particular school system and no matter if there is internet outage or any other software or hardware hitch; the task has to be completed at all costs.
The reasons for that toil beyond the call emanate from the fact that the parents rather the “online” parents having no time to actually sit with their wards now log on to those very networks to see for themselves the “progress” of their kids; while in actual world the kids might just be sitting or sleeping in the next room.
Likewise, the filing of work on software like Edmodo is like doing the homework online. Students are now put into added hassle to ensure that the internet connection is okay to log on to the software servers like Edmodo or Seesaw and then “File the homework”.
On the face of it, the whole exercise looks very trendy; but that type of educational band wagon has its own casualties and “collateral damage”. Today the students have literally forgotten to write clearly and in a beautiful writing. All these students know is to use the word processing software which does not demands any writing skills. All they have to format the text and that’s it.
That medium of education also kills in the process the creative skill of a student to think, deduce and then finalize his assessment of the task given. Today it is the world wide web with google, Wikipedia and other half-baked information portals which are copied and pasted by all to file the homework.
As against the student of 70 uptil 80s, who has to toil to seek the information in books and make notes; the student of today is totally sold to Wikipedia. That addiction to internet-based information while killing the creative and deducing faculty of the students; it also transforms the to be addicts of another type of download.
To put that clearly; when in schools they have been used to loaded information, packages downloaded from the internet and submitted as assignments or home works. Now in the bigger classes; they are totally clueless about how to go about the business of getting a comprehensive understanding of the subject. In that situation the tuition and the notes prepared by the teacher injecting that information are the guarantee of success. Today an O or A level student does not need to under the subject to battle the CIE system. He memorizes the notes by the heart and writes down the same as directed and guided by the tuition teacher. As he or she has no understanding of the subject; the notes by the teacher are the last resort or the only resort to get through.
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When in the practical scenario; that student does not know what to do in the practical world. However, he is lucky that the system he is entering into is not articulate or has roots in the origin either. So, the whole system keeps on moving or rather crawling in one way or another; in a complete directionless mode.
The outcome of this system of education is more devastating in the developing societies then in the developed world. The major difference being that while in the developed economies people are intimate with the original thought process; in the developing societies and especially the ones in a Split personality mode like Asian or Muslim societies; it is more of adoption of an imported way of life; about whose adoption we do not know or want to know why we are doing that set of activity.
The outcome of that set up are now being made visible in our professional and educational domains. Today we have PhD holders yet they cannot find solutions. Likewise, master’s in Business administration do not have the sense to visualize a business plan that best suits and amalgamates with the local tastes and needs of the market.
No doubt the سلیٹ (Slate) has been replaced by a Tablet۔تختی but the casualty of that digital transformation has been more of a disaster than a dividend for the society and the system.
Though these things might go undetected by many, but the stakes for the system in place are not encouraging. It needs a radical rethink of the priority and may be a return of regimented and controlled way of life than a complete free market economy one. It must not be forgotten that the most developed western societies are regimented along conservative lines. For societies having a proud heritage in the form of the prevalent world view; Islam; there is no reason for a bandwagon response.
The digitalization of education in a senseless way warrants the attention of the society, polity and the general public to get away from the assured road to disaster.
