A takeaway from a turbulent takeoff
The public schools have officially started School Year 2020-2021. Unlike the traditional opening of significant events, there was no grand opening salvo, no splendid performances, and no flowery speeches to mark the school year’s opening.
Teachers, learners, and parents are now struggling to give education a chance despite the current situation’s difficulties. Nobody is better prepared under the new normal in education. Opening the school year in this precarious time is a leap of faith, just like flying the plane while building it.
No less than Secretary Leonor Briones of the Department of Education is at the receiving end of badmouthing, curses, and insults for problems and difficulties that parents and learners have never encountered in the past. Doomsayers have predicted that the Department of Education will fail in its mandate because of so many problems of educating the learners using untested learning modalities.
The enormous problems in education brought about by the pandemic should not be taken advantage of by blabbermouths to discredit our educators’ efforts to continue their solemn duty of rearing the learners to become productive citizens. While this greatest disruption in education has caused problems and difficulties, this also brings a rare opportunity to closely examine educational theories, assumptions, beliefs, and traditions that we thought as inflexible standards in education delivery.
Before the pandemic, teachers had always been at the forefront of learning, not just doing lectures but diligently listening and recording what they hear and offering every learner a unique and rewarding learning experience, while parents took a supportive role in the learning process. Critics pointed out that the educational system’s problem is what Aristotle identified centuries ago when he said that “educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
Under the new normal, teachers now take a supportive role while parents are taking the lead in supervising their children as they comply with students. Education is no longer placed primarily with substitute parents and no longer delivered within the classroom’s four walls. It happens at home, where learning has first started and where the heart has better chances of being educated by no less than the parents.
Although our journey for a year of learning may have started with a bumpy takeoff, we should relish every experience that it brings as an opportunity to become a better person. The turbulence is there to test our resolve to cross from the darkness to light.