By: Ayyan Shaikh
We have all seen how fast the coronavirus spread throughout the world and how suddenly the world was in the middle of a pandemic, but what’s more disappointing is the reaction of schools and colleges.
Due to the sudden exponential increase in the COVID-19 cases, initially, educational institutes throughout the world struggled to come up with better policies to deal with the issue at hand. Students who lived in dorms and those who left their own country to pursue higher education were suddenly asked to evacuate their on-campus places with little time and money to sustain themself, which posed to be a great struggle for the youth.
Students throughout the world were struggling to make ends meet and as the whole world came to a halt for some time, so did their dreams and efforts. In the midst of all this, schools and universities started online classes. Now I don’t know about you, but I consider online classes to be useless. Online classes started at a time where everything was a mess and uncertainty had everyone looking at school boards to cooperate with them. But instead of letting people figure out how they’re going to deal with this pandemic, online classes acted more as a burden than something helpful. In addition to this, no one was willing to take these classes seriously at a time where economies were crashing and the employment level was going down. As a result, the pandemic lifestyle got even more hectic for students who did attend these classes.
As if this wasn’t enough, in the US, ICE had threatened to deport international students who were opting for online classes instead of in-person classes. And so, students had to decide whether they wanted to risk themselves getting the virus or they wanted to be deported after they had paid thousands of dollars for college classes. Fun right? However, this news was met with a widespread backlash. Many states filed a lawsuit representing a large number of international students. Harvard and MIT bought separate lawsuits which further received a tremendous amount of support. Thankfully due to all this criticism, the Trump administration withdrew this threat, but this still is a source of great concern for international students who continue to fear the administration’s future policies.
In Pakistan, schools and universities were closed as soon as the government announced a lockdown. Guidelines were followed by government schools but private schools, like always, created problems for their students. Cambridge board had decided to cancel the CIEs and instead asked for evidence from schools to grade their students on. Beaconhouse School System, in a move that was unethical and frankly speaking quite disappointing (but not surprising) deferred some of their students to give their exams in October/November without consulting them. The reason? They hadn’t paid the school fee for the months of May-June. Cie applications for Students were deferred to October/November despite them paying around Rs. 70K for their papers, and this not only created problems for students and their parents but also jeopardized their whole year and that too without any notice. Pakistan is a third world country, Pandemic has further deteriorated the condition of its economy. People were starving and struggling to survive in this country and the least BSS could have done was to ask the parents of the students, who had missed the fee submission for those pandemic-ridden months only, if they wanted to be deferred to later months.
The way educational institutes have been dealing with this pandemic show that they still need to work on their policies for emergencies so that students don’t suffer in the future if anything remotely close to what’s happening now, ever happens again.
(Image from here.)
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