Reshma Ravishanker

Private and government schools alike, advising students not to take notes in classrooms, rather asking them to gather content online is having Bengaluru’s NGOs and parents of underprivileged students fuming.

Complaints have been coming in from government and private schools across Bengaluru to NGOs. Students studying in some schools in the city have been directed to only listen to the teacher in class while notes would be shared on Whatsapp or content is to be referenced from online portals.

The challenges are plentiful. For one, parents and caretakers of underprivileged students claim that taking print outs for all classroom notes shared online is financially burdensome while NGOs are expressing concerns over undeniable access to internet and mobile phones for school going children.

Nagasimha Rao, director, Child Rights Trust said, “There is no practice of taking down notes in a few schools post the Covid-19 pandemic. Schools share PDFs via phones. Since schools have reopened for the current academic year, we are flooded with several calls from parents about students accessing adult content, unrelated content and ordering from online platforms without parental consent under the pretext of downloading notes. In one such case, a child also ordered from a food delivery platform and caretakers were caught unaware. We are getting such complaints from government and private schools alike.”

Gopinath R, Managing Trustee, Sparsha Trust (a rehabilitation centre for children socio-economic & familial challenges) expressed concerns over increased cost. “Schools prefer to send notes online. Internet access becomes mandatory to students. For us, monitoring has become a challenge. We are a residential home with 400 students. How can gadgets be provided to all of them? Also, we will need to recruit staff to just monitor internet usage to ensure child safety. This must be avoided wherever possible,” he said.

He added that the cost of printing each child’s class notes, projects materials and photos is a financially unviable exercise. “How will we bear the cost of printing or photocopying notes for so many students?” he questioned.

Skills deficit
Mangala Metri, a former educator and educational advisor, Surabhi Trust (an NGO for underprivileged students) said that the trend is picking pace in government schools and is concerning.

“Students are not bringing home handwritten notes from schools. Teachers ask them to check google or take photocopies of notes from previous years. Even for science projects, students are no longer asked to draw images and asked to bring print outs instead. There is an increased dependency for online learning than ever,” she said.

Metri also highlighted that this is resulting in a skills deficit among students who are already suffering from pandemic induced learning loss.

“Traditionally, teachers dictate, help students spell the difficult words. This improves a child’s observation, listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Student’s language abilities is bound to see a downward curve if they continue to only refer to notes that are readily available,” she added.

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