What a difference a brand new school year makes… for some of us, anyway.

The 2021-2022 school year kicked off last Monday in Trinidad and Tobago and it found us much in the same position as the previous school year had left us: struggling to figure out how to balance digital school and the ever-present necessity of earning a living.

For some of us, that means managing meetings, deadlines and all the other minutiae of the workday alongside the digital classes, assignments, meals and other assorted requirements of child supervision happening simultaneously throughout the day. It means accepting that this high-wire juggling act is next-to-impossible for one person to manage effectively at every moment, but doing your best anyway because what else are you going to do?

Others are trusting our child’s educational progress to the person providing childcare while we go out to work each day and then picking things up as best as possible upon our return home.

If this were the extent of the pandemic educational situation, it would be more than enough to have us longing for the Christmas break at the beginning of week 2, but it’s not.

As we cruise into 19 months since most of the nation’s children have set foot inside a school building, many households have achieved some sort of shaky equilibrium. The children are familiar with the tech, the parents and teachers have settled into a comms rhythm of messages and emails, and some amount of learning is happening.

We’re the lucky ones; those of us who either already had the infrastructure (devices and services), or were in a position to source them, and are tech-savvy enough to figure out the school’s platform of choice. Those of us whose children attend schools that were willing and able to pivot quickly to a digital learning environment have been doubly blessed.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case for many families, as I witnessed first-hand during our tumultuous first academic year of digital learning.

While my daughter is exceedingly fortunate to be the only child of a mother who is relatively educated, tech-savvy and has a bit of a background in education (and who happened to have an appropriate device handy when the world suddenly shifted online), our digital learning experience was less than blissful.

Over and above the obvious (and completely understandable) struggles of managing an unprecedented shift in the learning paradigm, I witnessed first-hand what can happen when those responsible for guiding the pivot are unable, for multiple reasons, to manage it smoothly. I also witnessed, second-hand, what it’s like to suddenly be responsible for guiding your child(ren)’s education in a new way without the necessary tools or know-how.

As we spent the past week settling into a new school with an entirely different approach to the one we left in July, I found myself thinking about the students we left behind at her previous school and the (many more) students collectively being left behind as this pandemic only widens the nation’s pre-existing knowledge gap. Against the backdrop of SEA results released last week, in which almost 7% more students scored under 30% than last year, I wonder if we grasp what kind of whirlwind we’re preparing to reap if we continue to ignore the ways we’re allowing children to tumble into the gaping chasm between those who have the good fortune of meaningful educational support and those who don’t.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, the “we’re all in the same boat” cliche was floated around pretty casually until it was pointed out that we’re actually in the same storm but not at all in the same boat. This is as true for our education system, which we know is rife with inequity, as it is for the wider societal trudge through this perpetual, purgatorial pandemic.

What disturbs me is the way we either know this, and seem to be fine with it so long as our personal business is fixed, or are completely oblivious to the way it’s undermining our society in various ways.

Over the weekend, I watched a debate over the SEA fanfare unfold in local parenting groups. One side felt that too much focus was placed on top students and high performance while the other side felt as if they were being attacked for praising their children for reaping the just rewards of their hard work. I felt that the entire exchange (which is practically an annual SEA tradition), was an exercise in missing the point.

A system that accepts failure from thousands of students each year (about 2,000 scored less than 30% last year) and plans to push them, unprepared, to the next level of education once they’ve failed enough or aged enough (whichever comes first), is a system that is quite comfortable throwing away a significant number of the children it is charged with educating.

Where do we think those children go when we let them fall through the cracks? They don’t sit quietly in the back of a classroom (or behind a switched off camera) forever. They grow up and discover exactly how little regard T&T has for individuals who fail to fit into its narrow framework of success.

And what do you suppose they do with that revelation?

We should know the answer to that question by now (and it’s way more nuanced than we would like to admit), but our behaviour when we encounter them as adults would suggest that we either think they dry up and blow away on the northeast trade winds or we wish they would.

This is where a different nautical cliché comes to mind: A rising tide lifts all boats. If the sea is the education system, one in which the baseline is a national agreement that ALL children deserve to be meaningfully educated (and not just the ones who won the familial lottery), then every single child benefits, from the ones on rafts made of driftwood, to the ones blessed to have been born on superyachts.

That last part is important because, as rooted in the remnants of colonial hierarchies as we are, too many of us have failed to grasp that the perception of scarcity encouraging us to dig out each others’ eye for opportunity is pure fabrication. Education is not a finite resource. It is also not a one-size-fits-all endeavour. As an independent nation with its own unique needs and talents, we are also well within our rights (and fully capable of) creating and implementing an educational model that isn’t designed to create docile drones.

At literally any point, we could decide to stop pretending that T&T only needs doctors, lawyers and engineers and finally get serious about addressing our ballooning food import bill by giving students so inclined an education that would enable them to help feed our nation. We could finally put our backs into meaningfully supporting our local arts and culture (a resource we tend to ignore up until someone else deems it valuable) by creating a curriculum that would develop the abundant latent artistic talents of our children. We could create a holistic educational system that addresses the traditional core subjects through the lens of how they apply to students’ lived experiences and their ambitions for their lives.

Can you imagine what a nation with children who were embraced, encouraged and enlightened in this way would look like?