Educating others is considered one of the noblest of professions, which is why teaching is sometimes referred to as a calling, and not just another job. But the teacher’s role in our young generation’s character formation and education cannot succeed without constant parental support and guidance — a fact that was made glaringly obvious by the months of home-study enforced by COVID-19 restrictions.
Hong Kong’s children and student community have faced some extremely challenging learning environments, dating back to December 2019, with the just concluded violent social unrest closely followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby severely disrupting their educational journey. To some extent, the good fortune of being in a well-developed and well-resourced city as Hong Kong has allowed for digital intervention to act as a good educational stopgap. But this stopgap is no substitute for a face-to-face, interactive holistic education.
With that as a backdrop, there is a disquieting lethargy in the education community in confronting the emotional, mental and physical stress that such relentless online education would cause to our young students. Is it out of sight, out of mind? But here’s something that should get all teachers and parents to sit up and pay notice. Some alarming statistics recently released by the Education Bureau showed that some 23 primary and secondary pupils appear to have committed suicide during the 2019-20 school year, up from 20 in 2018-19. If nothing else, it is an unmistakable signal that something is seriously amiss in how we monitor the emotional state of our young students.
Despite that, there appears to be an ominous drive to hard-sell the digitalization of education. The premature resignation of some to accept and even promote continued online learning as the new normal is clearly unhelpful to the healthy development and learning of our children.
The overzealous commentators and influencers must temper their enthusiasm for IT gadgets and various learning devices. They should realize that pushing for an isolationist study-from-home education regime as the new normal goes against the very basic instinct of humans as social animals. The importance of human interaction in early education cannot be overemphasized as this is how young minds learn to collaborate and coexist peacefully with fellow human beings, and to accept that we do not always get what we want. Because of our low birth rate and our relative affluence, educators have been warning about the upcoming “snowflake generation”, which dissolves under the mildest of challenges.
Apart from the danger of missing out on human interaction afforded by traditional, or normal schooling, parents and caretakers should be cognizant of the ill effects of excessive strain on the eyes and the musculoskeletal system under virtual learning.
The adults have a moral, if not parental, obligation toward the children, so as to facilitate an environment, whereby they can once again be acting normally in a normal school setting that affords irreplaceable opportunities for students to interact with each other, learn how to give and take, develop their full range of emotions and expressions, practice basic social skills, and even respect playground etiquette, for that matter.
Encouraging no physical schooling is likely to push our children to grow into a dysfunctional, socially inept, and awkward generation. Surely the educators and the responsible adults would not want for the young ones to claim that their tablets, laptops, and mobile phones are their closest of kin or best of friends; simply because owing to a digitization excess, they look at and “communicate” more to and with their gadgets and lose the need for human interaction? As Albert Einstein put it astutely, “I believe that the abominable deterioration of ethical standards stems primarily from the mechanization and depersonalization of our lives — a disastrous byproduct of science and technology. Nostra culpa! (We are to blame!)”
And in all this hype, let’s also be mindful of and considerate toward the children with less fortunate socioeconomic demographics. As online learning is very clearly and obviously a bridge too far for them, the longer this practice continues, the worse their educational marginalization will become. May God help Hong Kong’s educationally marginalized non-Chinese-speaking children, who were, as it is, already on the backfoot, owing to a less than inclusive educational environment. Now with the fad of digitalization hijacking their education, they will inevitably suffer further setbacks to their learning.
Being tech-savvy and internet friendly are certainly necessary skill sets. But are they helpful replacements to physical, in-person interactions, classes, and activities?
Let us please not careen to this state of devolution wherein gaming consoles could replace the Olympics and the World Cups, wherein humans lose the finesse to play the violin or the sitar, wherein humans lose their ability to speak coherently — far less sing!
As adults, it is our undeniable moral and social responsibility to do whatever it takes in order to get the young ones back into classrooms and return their basic rights of access to in-person schooling! The educators have an even deeper professional obligation to approach the situation with a solution-oriented and positive mindset and ensure that under the guise of study-from-home and digitalization, children are not wilfully or inadvertently marginalized owing to a misguided worship of technology. There is a better way to provide our children a holistic education. We have done it before. There is no need to reinvent the wheel! But let’s start with a digital detox!
The author is the co-founder and CEO of Integrated Brilliant Education, a charity providing educational support, with special emphasis on Chinese-language learning to Hong Kong’s underserved and educationally marginalized non-Chinese speaking children.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.