Are You Concerned About The Adverse Effects Of Digital Education On Kids? Read This.

Is virtual education helping the kids during this pandemic? Parents and teachers across the globe are afraid it’s not. Or, to put into better words, both have different reasons for worrying.  Starting from India, parents are worried about the push to already-existing addiction to screens. A concerned mother told Hindustan Times, “Will such a lifestyle lead to lethargy setting in? We are absolutely concerned about what the long-term impact of this new kind of lifestyle and teaching can be.” 

The sad tag-along with this addiction, now a necessity in this period, is the effect on mental health with prolonged screen time. A psychology teacher, Dr Kanika Ahuja, from Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College, explained, “Increased screen time can cause increased sedentary behaviour in children and teens, decreased metabolism, disturbance in the sleep cycle, more distractibility and perhaps lower well-being.” She continued, “The key question is how much is too much? We have no clear answers. There is an urgent need for research in India considering that a large part of education will be shifted online for at least 1-2 years.”

Another concern that is whirling around parents is the lack of attention on kids’ education with their working jobs followed by the struggle of being a teacher of tough subjects like mathematics. There is a lingering feeling of not being qualified enough to be their full-time teachers. 

Teachers, on the other hand, are scared of the setback for their students. Digital, however helpful, isn’t allowing them to impart lessons and teach the personal way they could. And, the horrible reality of not being able to reach students from low-income families is only increasing the inequality gap between students of the same batch. "The inequities that we already were dealing with – that we already knew about – COVID-19 is compounding all of these inequities," told one of the US-based educators to CNN.

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A big setback is being witnessed for grade school students, who were in the process of laying critical foundations of reading and writing. The lockdown is robbing a generation of small children of vital stages of learning. "It's kind of a double whammy of starting to forget and losing that kind of academic mindset of being out of school, and missing out on a couple of important months of instruction,” said Megan Kuhfeld, a research scientist at the Northwest Evaluation Association's Collaborative for Student Growth Research Center. 

A New York-based teacher explained with an example that one of her first-grader students was finally getting to grips with reading and was making enormous progress but has forgotten a lot of his sight words due to the pandemic-induced lockdown. She told CNN, "He is already back to those very basic reading skills where he's having to sound out every word. It's disappointing to see because he will be moving onto second grade next year and he's now going to be nearly two years behind."

Thoughts?

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