Keeping students out of school is dangerous, counterproductive

Many parents are thinking of skipping the present school year altogether, taking a chance on the possibility that the pandemic will fizzle out by next year. Sadly, that may not happen at all.

The Black Plague, which incidentally came to Europe also from the Far East in 1347, decimated a quarter of its population. Over the next 300 years, it kept coming back again and again. Until now, there’s still no known cure for HIV, which emerged way back in the early ’80s, and no vaccine had been developed against SARS or MERS-CoV. We have to face the grim reality that COVID-19 could be cohabiting planet Earth with us for quite a long time. What will our children do in the meantime? Keeping them out of school is dangerous and counterproductive.

1) Out-of-school youth with so much idle time on their hands tend to engage in experimental, exploratory, and adventuristic undertakings such as smoking, drugs, sex, gambling, or prostitution, which could in turn lead them to graduate to even more daring excursions and expeditions into delinquent, aberrant, antisocial, immoral, or downright criminal activities.

2) Making children stop schooling in midstream breaks the chain, cycle, and momentum of the learning process and makes them lose interest and the motivation to study to better themselves.

3) It promotes a negative orientation toward a life that is unfettered and unstructured, a la-la land, as it were. School provides children not just the physical structure, but also the mental, social, ethical, and moral parameters, what some of us disparagingly call “the box,” out of which children become lost and listless, unhinged and unmoored.

4) Children made to stop schooling at their early formative and foundational growing-

up years develop a lifelong defeatist mindset that it is easier to simply yield and surrender when faced with the many vicissitudes of life and fortune, that the easy way out is to give in.

5) What will children who’ve stopped schooling feel when they return to class after one or two years, only to realize they’ve been left behind by their former classmates?

6) Many parents may think that keeping their children away from school, even for just one or two years, is a way to avoid their financial difficulties, unmindful of the disastrous and long-term consequences. Education has long been recognized by the poor as a way to escape poverty. Interrupting or disrupting children’s education delays and short-circuits their chances of finding good-paying jobs that will uplift their lives in the future.

This pandemic is a real bad-ass problem, but there are solutions open to us. In education, private schools such as the Marian School will resort to online or virtual teaching and learning, to gradually morph into blended learning if and when the situation improves. Public schools will use modules that parents can get from their respective barangay halls to take home to teach their children. Asking children to stop schooling is not a solution but a capitulation.

We have to learn to adapt, evolve, morph, and transform, exactly like what the corona-

virus is doing, by improvising, innovating, pioneering, and trailblazing. The enemy is us, after all. If we are not brave, if we are irresolute, the virus that’s black as death will triumph. We can distance ourselves from each other socially and physically, but we must come together in this battle as a people with one heart and one mind.

Antonio Calipjo Go
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