Student Spectrums

Aisha Ahmed is a high schooler at Ilm Academy. She likes to reflect on issues that directly affect students, and invites discussions from readers.

It’s a fact that online school has helped us tremendously during COVID. If it wasn’t for that, many children, including myself, would’ve missed a whole year of school. However, this once was true, but now I get a notion that online school may indirectly be harming our education. While physically going to school may seem more tedious and effortful than online school, I believe it is still the safest option, because we are actually learning something and have more human interactions.

It would be unethical to generalize the fact that a lot of people didn’t pay attention during online school, but we can’t just sideline it, because it still happened. Everything has its pros and cons, and in this case, online school may have a few more cons than normal schooling. This is because it minimizes our interactions and keeps us cooped in a room or an office, for seven hours straight, every day. In school, we go outside for recess and lunch. Some people may argue that we could also go outside during breaks in online school, but how many of us are really willing to do that? 

I’m not denying how helpful online schooling has been for us. In fact, according to NCES (National Center for Educational Statistics), 77% of public schools and 73% of private schools in the U.S. transitioned to online school, at the beginning of COVID. We won’t forget all of the benefits, but the point here is that if it is still necessary for us, after COVID has subsided? 

Online school slowly cultivates laziness in person. This is mainly because of not having to make efforts to go to school. If online school starts at 7:00 a.m. sharp, we can wake up at 6:59 and not worry about being tardy. Whereas, school would require having to get up at least half an hour early to get ready and for the time it takes to reach. In this way, school promotes responsibility in individuals, teaches us how to be punctual and on time, and causes us to strive for our goals. 

Schools also provide guidelines that need to be met, to make sure we don’t  form sloppy habits. A big part of this is uniforms and dress codes. While most schools don’t have uniforms, they have dress codes, in order to keep things civilized. However, in online school, we usually wear casual clothing, since we’re at home, which in a way  displaying how careless we are and continues cultivating the laziness within us.  

In fact, we can just have our cameras off and be on mute the entire time, and teachers wouldn’t be able to do anything about. This means that we could do anything we want and no one would know. This critical factor is something that causes us the most harm, because we go to school to learn and we won’t learn anything by “goofing off.”

Online school just opens up a “Pandora’s Box” of possibilities to cheat and get away with things, especially our responsibilities. Hence, if it isn’t needed anymore, more people should aim to promote normal schooling, because of its effect on our morality and responsibilities. It creates individuals who are eager to strive for our goals and are ready to face any challenge with an open mind.