College daze: Lessons from a raging pandemic

A college student who is undergoing education online reflects on the very meaning and purpose of learning when the country is under lockdown battling a raging pandemic.

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We live in absurd times.

Our lives are now consumed, subsumed and interred in the pandemic that rages around us. It has been over a year of intermittent lockdowns, as what we thought was an end to the pandemic turning into a far more devastating second wave.

For the most part, educational institutions have remained closed, with all learning being done online across the country. Sure, hybrid systems have been tried in certain cases; some institutions have tried to bring back certain groups of students who require a campus/classroom presence over a mere screen presence. But overall, it has only been online. Of course, only where online is a possibility.

Here I give you the perspective of a college student, completing his third semester online, and the second one completely online and what my thoughts are, at the moment.

Longing for normalcy

At first, the pandemic seemed temporary. The transition semester, from offline to online, exactly a year ago, was one that seemed to be relatively smooth. As the online semester was coming to a close, there was hope all around that by September, we would be back on campus. Sure, there was nothing we could do over the summer but this hope of return kept me going through the restrictive summer vacation, and the beginning of the next semester.

Of course, this was not to happen, and so the hope was then shifted onto the following January. Perhaps, the campus would be opened up by then? There’s no way we can be online for more than a year, I thought to myself. But I was proved wrong.

Between the first and second waves, I managed a short holiday, which I was, and am, quite thankful for. This little venture of freedom would be what kept me going, hopeful that the worst was over. But the second wave hit barely two weeks after that. And after that, I have lost any hope of August, the start of my third year, being a viable time to return to campus.

As I return to another summer online with two years of college now over, hope and happiness are in short supply while desperation and futility are the overpowering emotions.

Need for campus

Being on campus is, for a college student, vital. I think that the lack of a physical space where one learns to grow is more than just the environment of higher education. It’s a space to be attached to, somewhere to make mistakes, friendships, attachments, and learn how to be a person by yourself.

The campus life is about learning to take care of yourself without parents being there to guide you and do things for you. For most of us, it’s the first time away from home and it’s this separation from the familiar that shapes us and helps us forge an independent identity.

We make friends, we form attachments, learn how to spend money (wisely or unwisely) and explore the regions we inhabit—for me the closest city was Delhi, and given the metro connectivity, the city was an open treasure chest, waiting to be explored.

The pandemic has thrown up several problems, being off campus. But there are other issues that plague the closure of a campus. This has meant that a lot more people are opting for colleges closer to home than would have been the case otherwise. Cost and ability to access the physical space are now determining more students studying in India.

The biggest trouble is having to be at home at a time when one should be learning to live an independent life, and forming meaningful, lifelong connections with my friends.

Digital doubts

But what about others who are unable to access the internet due to various reasons? Economically, socially, geographically? By being off campus, one is necessitated to connect to education via the internet. Does education now come at the cost of having digital accessibility?

Is the pandemic going to enforce an educational divide, between those who were able to be educated in the pandemic and those families whose education was set back by a generation because of families who could not earn and send their children to the next class or to a university simply because they could not buy a WiFi router?

Some have only a single smartphone with which to access the internet. Online learning is a precarious solution at best. It has been a year; the longer the pandemic stretches the worse this situation becomes. Those whose households have been without access to livelihood are unable to earn, and the situation only gets worse the longer the pandemic draws on.

The question of non-elite institutions and their upkeep remains something to think about as well.

In search of purpose

This then begs the question—in such a scenario, what worth does a college degree have? Mental fatigue and faster burnout rates mean that students are absorbing and learning less. This is my reality, what I see around me. A degree issued in a pandemic is, in a sense, a certification of non-learning for a large part.

What it displays is that a student has gone through the motions at the time of a great societal upheaval where thousands were dying, forced to focus on putting in other unrelated information into their heads. It is in essence testimony that you put yourself through a setup that taught you little but was necessary because of societal expectations.

In such a situation, is keeping educational institutions open at this time beneficial? Earlier pandemics and outbreaks of diseases did not have the luxury of WiFi and remote learning like we do now. Has this remote learning then been more of a curse, forcing us to carry on with our daily lives as close to the ‘norm’ as possible, as hundreds of people die every day?

The more important question then would be whose future are we studying for? Is education then merely a matter of social status? Do we not absorb anything (that happens around us) anymore? Keep aside the argument against rote learning and mugging up. That’s a valid criticism of a physical classroom. Imagine doing that virtually. Have we stopped to look around and ask ourselves, is this degree going to mean anything?

Achieving ‘normalcy’ is something we are striving hard to do now. With the second wave, things are not looking good, but all of us together, citizens, are helping one another stay alive right now. Cemeteries are reaching their limit, crematoriums are full, and makeshift ones are being built. It’s going to take us a while.

As we try to move towards getting ourselves back to a way of life that allows us to move and live like we used to, perhaps, it’s time to reflect on what we ought to retain and what are the really archaic practices that we maintain simply because we have not had the opportunity to question them, until now.