Every crisis creates a new behaviour

Every crisis creates a new behaviour. Crises are not recorded in the annals of history just as events, but rather for their transformative power impacting human behaviour. Anthropologists record the generalisation that 'behaviour is the most immediate casualty and the most enduring consequence of crisis.' Most of the times, what is adopted as a stopgap measure becomes the norm and then, over time, solidifies into a permanent pattern.

The 2008 global financial crisis spurred a behavioural change towards financial risk management. The 2019 Covid introduced work from home, online marketing and online learning, which come into vogue whenever the physical existence is threatened and becomes threatening. It's good to be adaptive by necessity. However, it is not necessary that everything born out of crisis is constructive. It is specifically true of online learning, which has failed as a substitute for in-person education.

The recent US-Iran conflict, which forced the world to think about energy security, caused here in Pakistan the closure of educational institutions. It further dented the academic calendar to four days a week, as five days were already a routine, though only in public institutions.

Though public institutions are bound to comply with state policies, the owners of private institutions, already fed up with too frequent government interventions into their policies, put their heads together to find a way out, ostensibly, to minimise the learning loss of their students. 'Ostensibly', because the shrunken academic year is a level playing field for all educational institutions, both public and private. The public schools would still lag far behind, as they get fewer academic days because they have to comply with state orders of closure of institutions and start their academic year for terminal classes in April, three months later than that of the private institutions where the academic year starts in January.

The owners of private institutions are right in a way, as they don't want to lag behind in the rat race of winning academic laurels in the terminal board examinations. They are thinking of launching their own educational academies, as educational coaching centres are mostly overlooked for closures in many a crisis. But they must think a thousand times because academies running on parallel lines weaken the formal education of schools and colleges as students prefer the informal milieu at academies over school formalism. The solution of the problem will make it worse – the Cobra Effect.

Let's understand the impact of disrupted education in microcosm. The teacher absenteeism, non-teaching duties, and consumption of teachers in away-from-institution social and national activities disrupted education at public institutions, which resulted in the mushroom growth of tuition centres. The state must not force private institutions to come up with something self-destructive out of the crises .

The students at public institutions are left marooned by frequent closures of the institutions. Only a sliver of them have access to online modes of instruction, and the rest drop out of the education fold. The inevitability of dropout is aggravated by the inflation that goes steep in the times of emergencies and crises as more earning hands are needed for sustenance and survival. Whereas online marketing and monetisation of social media were the new behaviours spawned by the Covid-19 crisis, financial security sat in the back of the mind of lower- to middle-income earners. Education, particularly formal one, bore the real brunt and lost its importance among the lower and middle classes, perpetuating their existential inferiority and poverty.

Though governments announce with a patriotic zeal the austerity measures to brace the geopolitical tensions, financial regressions and environmental disasters, the learning community feels deprioritised when the first casualty becomes the education. Students become children of a lesser god as the PSL is being held amidst the energy conservation calls. The gains from the PSL are immediate while those from education are slow and steady. Deprioritisation of education is the new behaviour created by polycrises in our land. A classic case of myopic vision.