Why Online Education is not Xavierian

Jomon Jose 

2020 was a year when many impossibles became possible. Education without an organized school structure was one of them. In Nepal, the unplanned nationwide total lockdown in late March 2020, just two days before the scheduled Class 10 Board Exams (SEE, School End Examination), threw the education system into an elephantine conundrum. With the year-end examinations still to be conducted and the admission procedures for the new academic session still to be planned, the schools were caught off-guard.  For the next three months, the government engaged in unrealistic rhetoric about bringing the students back to school for the exams but had to succumb to the inevitable; it announced the cancellation of SEE and decided to promote students based on the internal evaluation by individual schools.  With no abetting of Covid-19 in sight, the government took another two months to publish the final results. The government’s dilly-dallying caused the loss of five precious months for the schools to promote students to higher levels and plan and implement alternative modes of teaching. 

In the meantime, some schools in Kathmandu Valley resorted to online classes. St. Xavier’s Schools were one of the first to do so. Initially, the online classes were meant to keep the students occupied at home. Materials for homework were sent to the students through the school Apps who then had to submit their answers to their respective teachers using the same online platform. Later, Google classrooms were created for each Class and subject. Lecture schedules were fixed and monthly and term exams were conducted. Even extra-curricular activities like sports hours had a scheduled period in the online classrooms. 

Many schools in the country have followed suit. Physically structured classrooms metamorphosed into internet-based “corona classrooms”, making the former almost irrelevant. “Group chat”, “shared screen”, and “simultaneous writing documents”,  “Webinar” and “zoom” have become the order of the day. (That it privileges the ‘haves’ in Nepal is conspicuous with the fact that close to 45% of its population lacks access to internet. This however is a topic for another article).

While online classes, aka remote learning and distant learning, have distinctive advantages, it is incompatible with Xavierian education. Xavierian education is based on the vision of its 16^th century founder, Ignatius of Loyola, who put the aim of schools in deceptively simple terms: schools should bring about “improvement in learning and living”. Improvement in learning is understood to be intellectual formation and improvement in living is understood to be character formation. Xavierian education is based on the assumption that formation of character is the most important ‘help’ a school can give its pupils.  Thousands of Xavierian alumni would attest to the fact that it is this insistence on formation of character that makes Xavierian education different.

Online education, while based on the principles of efficiency, ease and convenience, falls short of achieving the most important aim of Xavierian education: character formation. First of all, formation of character demands presence. Presence is transformative. In this presence, we participate in “real” reality and not in virtual reality. Second, Xavierian education involves an encounter with ‘models’  administrators, teachers, support staff and others who embody the values that the schools aim to form in its pupils. In the absence of such encounters with educators and fellow learners, character formation is dwarfed.  Xavierian education works through a student’s imitation of the teacher whose words and actions draw out young people to see, know, and desire the way, the truth, and the life. Virtual screens truncate the fullness of one’s modeling of others. Finally, online learning makes “context”, which is one of the five pivots of Xavierian pedagogy, absent. Xavierian pedagogy demands that educators are immersed in the context of the students; that is, educators meet students where they are, in their physical, emotional, psychological, social, economic, and familial contexts. Educators must “feel”the learners, and only then can they know them; and this unlocks the fullness of education. No screen can fully manifest the person whom we are teaching. 

In any crisis, one of the worst affected sectors is education. Nepal has had firsthand experience of it when during the decade-long Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) a generation of its school-going children was deprived of quality education. Let us not make the same mistakes. It is time for our schools to stop resting on the apparent comfort of on-line education and think of alternative and innovative ways of teaching and learning where educators and learners are ‘present’ to each other. Only then will our students be formed into persons of learning and persons of character. 

[Jomon Jose is a faculty member of St. Xavier’s College, Maitighar. He is currently pursuing his Ph. D. in education in the Faculty of Pedagogy, Trnava University, Slovakia.]