The Corona Virus Covid - 19 Pandemic has forced many of us to adapt to newer ways of living. While social and corporate institutions remain physically shut, the concept of working from home has permeated into nearly every occupation and institution. When the central government announced the first lockdown in March, school education hit a brick wall. Since then many successive lockdowns and phased re-openings have been introduced. 

Recently, in another phase of unlocking and easing lockdown restrictions, the Indian government left it to the states and UTs to decide whether and how they want to re-open and function schools. While state governments decide when exactly they are going open up schools and how many children would be allowed in the school premises at a time, it is the school staff, primarily the school teachers and administrative departments who will ensure a safe, steady and equitable re-opening of schools. 

First, this re-opening needs to be safe to ensure children maintain proper social distancing rules and, are not left un-administered even during lunch breaks and recesses. Instead of making sure students do not break social distancing rules by sanctioning punishments for their actions, teachers need to ensure students understand why they need to be cautious right now. Positive reinforcement to maintain proper social distancing norms will give better results than sanctioning punishments for breaking the rules. Breaking rules right now will lead to students and their families falling sick, and not to the standard suspension that an act of rebellion earlier would follow. So teachers need to ensure that they explain to their students just precisely why they need to be taking precautionary measures. It would be advisable for schools to keep health checks on students. Schools need to have infirmaries now, with a staff capable of testing for covid and, of diagnosing symptoms. 

Second, a steady re-opening of schools is essential right now to make sure we do not overestimate our capacities and put students in danger of contracting and spreading the virus. Gone are the times of glorifying full annual attendance. Encouraging students by giving them an award for not missing a single day of school, no matter what the circumstances, was preposterous pre-covid and is unimaginable now. What will be beneficial right now is partial attendance, as most government schools lacked the infrastructure to seat students properly even pre-covid. Schools need to take realistic and steady steps now, more than ever.

Lastly, the way schools functioned for either teachers or students earlier cannot be the precedent right now. This pandemic has forced us all to introspect and rethink our ways of being in society. It is high time we rethink school education, especially the way it is imparted. In the grand scheme of things, how much do primary classes’ grades matter? Why do we grade class II or class IV students on a scale of A to F? The whole system of ranking primary school students needs to be rethought. Instead of ranking pupils of the same primary class relatively to one another, what we need to focus on is that all students in different levels within primary schools share the same level of foundational skills. After a break of eight long months, many students would have forgotten their pre-covid course material and many others would have taken private tuitions to keep up with their course-work. What schools now need to do, is to affirm and guide, this post-covid education in an equitable way, in that we do not pit students against each other to compete for class ranks. 

This pandemic has significantly altered the way societies function, mostly in negative ways like surging unemployment rates, but some of those alterations, like schools shutting down, can be used to create better outcomes. We should have had many of these conversations and subsequently policy interventions sooner, but it is not too late even now, for us to rethink our strategy for school education. Encouraging school students to compete with each other at all levels, from primary to higher education needs to be rethought and urgently. India, as a country, also needs to address its infrastructural inadequacies in terms of government schools. Subsequently, teachers need to urgently re-orient their efforts in light of Covid-19.