School's out for Covid
Summer holidays at last! And an opportunity for commentators to look back over a year of teaching in the pandemic - and to consider what lessons can been learned for next year.
No upgrades for Generation Covid
Grades for Swedish school-leaving exams are much better for 2021 than in previous years. Dagens Nyheter suspects they were boosted to compensate for the difficulties of the pandemic and disapproves:
“This is particularly unfair for other age groups who worked hard for their grades. ... Lulling school leavers into believing they have more knowledge than they actually do is a disservice. ... Their knowledge level should determine what further education they get - not who decided on their grades or what school they went to. However unfair the conditions during the pandemic may have been, this principle must also apply to 'Generation Covid'.”
An aid package for the young!
School pupils need support programmes to help them catch up with gaps in their learning due to Covid, Die Presse demands:
“Anyone who has kids in school knows that after this year any deficits will not be smaller but in all likelihood, larger. Making up for them will be a far bigger challenge than both pupils and teachers want to admit now, at the start of the long-awaited holidays. ... Teenagers are and will be the losers of this crisis. ... The federal and regional governments must put together a huge youth package for the autumn - containing everything from a lump sum for individual tutoring to funding programmes and new recreational activities.”
Parents also have an educational mandate
Children want to learn - and this need must also be met at home, comments the writer Ali Erkan Kavaklı in Yeni Akit:
“For the past year, at the request of the hodja of our mosque, I have been taking care of the kids in our quarter. ... They have an insatiable appetite for learning and the more they learn the happier they get. ... The virus plague has prevented our children from attending school for the past year and a half. Education was left to the skills of mothers and fathers. Parents are no experts in education, as we know, but they are also the most effective teachers. We are responsible for our children's education, this is too great a responsibility for it to be transferred to others.”