Gap Year

Due to technological hurdles, and not wanting to put the country's progress in containing SARS-COV2 at risk, Kenya has decided that public schools will not convene for the 2020-2021 academic year.

I believe that this is smart decision and one that other countries should consider, particularly those who are considering remote education for this academic year.

The final months of the 2019-2020 academic year were held remotely and I was offered the opportunity to witness the academic experience from the perspective of my daughters, who are 6 and 9. It was clear to me that they were not learning, or at least not learning adequately to even begin to justify the time spent in front of the computer screen, not to mention the tuition expense.

I have job experience as a classroom teacher to students in the 10-12 year old range, and I can unequivocally state that remote learning for those students would have been a mixed bag, at best. There simply was too much variability in the student's level of focus and the amount of home support available to them to predict good outcomes for many of these students. Are we to leave these students behind while the other half marches onward?

Also, teaching children, particularly younger children, is by necessity a very hands-on and interactive job. The physical presence of a charismatic and energetic instructor provides a focal point which is the beginning of the learning process. The interactions between the students and the instructor, and perhaps even more importantly between the student and his fellow students, are of vital importance. Debate, group problem solving, competition and other group activities are absolutely necessary to achieve real learning.

In the United States most school districts are marching ahead with remote learning without any data to indicate how the students will perform. If standardized testing at the mid-point of the 2020-2021 academic year indicates that it is not working, are we prepared to abandon the experiment or are we going to allow these unprepared students to advance to the next grade?

For all of these reasons, I encourage a debate over the option of taking a gap year, with the plan to reconvene in-person classes when conditions permit.