“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” – William Arthur Ward.
The two years 2020 and 2021 will be remembered not only as the pandemic years with health and economic problems but also as the greatest education crisis in living memory as lockdowns put an abrupt halt to regular in-school learning.
Schools, universities, businesses, hospitals, law makers and enforcement entities and all the stake holders had to rapidly switch to remote operational procedures. In the process of searching for ways to minimise human contact while catering to daily needs of life, in general, the world has experienced an explosion of innovations and new technologies as never before.
Through this process of change and adjustment the world could see how optimists made the maximum use of opportunities that sprung up due to the pandemic. One might even see how true Winston Churchill has been when he said:
Record time
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity while an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”. Citizens of the world can certainly be proud of most of the outcomes of their optimistic innovative thinking which even resulted in several vaccines against Covid-19 in record time.
However, there is another group of fellow citizens who are struggling with financial difficulties, psychological trauma, anxiety, and depression due to pandemic related atrocities they had to face.
Though studies conducted by the WHO have not shown a significant increase in suicide rates in countries such as the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia, some of the other countries like Japan and South Korea have reported an increase in suicide rates after the pandemic.
One alarming statistic Sri Lankans as a community should be concerned about is the increase in suicides in the age-group 8 to 16 years. According to statistics published by the Sri Lanka Police, suicides within this age group has gone up by 15 percent in the year 2020 compared to pre-pandemic years even though the total number of suicides in the country doesn’t show a significant increase within the same year.
Paying a closer attention to and educating citizens of all ages about mental health issues is the main recommendation under ‘Community-level interventions’ in the policy document for suicide prevention in Sri Lanka compiled by the Expert Committee on Suicide Prevention established by Sri Lanka Medical Association in December 2019.
The document calls upon all the medical faculties in the country, the SLMA, the Ministry of Health, the National Institute of Health Science and the College of Psychiatrists, Community Physicians and general practitioners to collaborate not only among themselves but also with the media and the media regulatory bodies addressing these issues and establishing appropriate awareness programs.
The importance of collaborating on taking immediate actions on such recommendations not only by the organisations mentioned in the document but also by each and every citizen, especially the adult population, of the country cannot be over emphasised.
As schools and higher educational institutes cautiously reopen, this is a good time to analyse what changes, if any, will the Covid-19 crisis have imposed on learners, teachers, institutes, and education systems as a whole? As schools, universities and policy makers were developing and implementing rapid-response schemes at a pace and scale never seen before to introduce remote teaching/learning procedures, important and necessary discussions and analyses about challenges, deficits and inequities within systems did not seem to be a priority.
An important aspect of such analyses would be to examine what type of leadership is needed to guide education systems through these difficult times introducing positive changes beyond the pandemic-induced crisis.
Educational leadership
Educational leadership together with policy makers should be willing and able to examine the very core of education itself, inspiring reflective thinking among the stakeholders at all levels on the purpose and values at the heart of the process.
Sri Lankan society is yet to learn that mental illness is not anything to be ashamed of and should be treated as any other illness where professional help is an essential component of the path to recovery.
Clinical psychologists have suggested that while it is important to focus on identifying the problems such as pessimistic thinking and feeling of helplessness and find ways to fix them, it is equally important, if not more, to teach people how to develop optimistic thinking.
They have studied what is known as ‘learned helplessness’, which involves giving up when one believes that nothing one does will make any difference in the situation. Their argument is that if feelings such as helplessness and pessimism can be a part of learned behaviors, then why not optimism?
Researchers suggest that in addition to being partially hereditary, optimism levels are also influenced by childhood experiences. Their work further suggests that it is possible to learn the skills that can help one become more optimistic irrespective of how pessimistic they were to begin with.
Their recommendations show that it is beneficial to teach children optimism skills late enough in childhood so that children have the metacognitive skills to think about their own thoughts, but prior to the onset of puberty. Teaching such skills during this critical period, researchers believe, might be the key to helping children ward off a number of psychological issues including depression, which is one of the key factors leading to suicides.
The most important and effective forum to address the issue of learned optimism, outside one’s family network perhaps, is the education system of the country.
Though education is no longer considered as a necessity for human development other than as an instrument for economic progress, the institutions claim to be providing such education use phrases such as “student-centered learning” and “opportunities for individualised programs” that are contradictory to the assembly-line like process of issuing diplomas and degrees.
Such institutions have become almost like automated diploma/degree producing factories in their efforts to make the process as customer friendly as possible to attract better clientele.
The world has accepted this concept of using children as raw material for these education factories in the process of manufacturing adults the market needs to sustain the economic progress.
Navigating through all the new concepts and trends, such as, student-centered teaching, use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart classrooms through Learning Management Systems (LMS), online teaching/learning and assessments, and Integrated/Blended Learning all the way to virtual schools and universities, in the field of education, has itself become an intimidating challenge for all the stake holders involved in the process.
Instead of educational philosophies and human interactions, new technologies have started dictating the future of teaching-learning processes.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced almost all the formal education systems of the world to use these technologies without any knowledge about the feasibility or the possible negative effects, if any.
Post-Covid educational leadership will have to spend the better part of their time and energy in humanising future education approaches while recognising that the teaching/learning process is collaborative and is deeply connected with the life-long pursuit of happiness.
They will need to prioritise key competencies such as social and emotional learning and wellbeing in the quest to continue creating inviting and sustainable learning environments in the future. It is important that the leadership at every level – from parents, religious leaders, healthcare professionals, schoolteachers, Principals, Zonal Officers, Directors, Vice Chancellors, University Grants Commission officers, Education Ministry officers to Ministers of Education –understands that: Optimism is a mental attitude characterised by hope and confidence in a positive outcome.
The writer has served in higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fifteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]