Teaching across the whole world is taking a new turn amid the “Covid-19” pandemic. Decision-makers in educational systems are moving to review everything relating to the mechanisms of teaching's transition from the classroom to digital teaching, which it is not yet known whether it will mark this age irreversibly. In the midst of these changes, some educational systems have shown their steadiness and the ease of their transition from the four corners of the classroom to distance learning without great obstacles, while the difficulties have emerged in the fragile educational systems that were not built at their foundation to keep pace with the age and with technological development.
In Lebanon there is as yet no official information about the difficulties facing this sudden transition, nor about the mechanism by which teachers and specialists work, whether in the private or the public sector, nor about how one should work with children with special needs - the group most in need of follow-up at every psychological, developmental and academic level. Nor is there any real experience so far of monitoring what the specialists in this field are doing, nor clear information about the situation of these children and whether they have been prepared psychologically and emotionally for this separation from school - especially as special education services mostly belong to the private sector, with no clear authority for them that would enable families or the relevant ministries to follow up or hold to account, besides the fact that every institution works according to its own curriculum.
The educational system did not take into account at the foundation of its construction children's individual differences and needs
The lack of a clear vision in this field takes us back to Thorndike's theory of trial and error - until we discover later, and perhaps after the time has passed, that our experiments in the field of distance learning with the group of children with special needs are not useful and are not unified across all the educational institutions. The difficult economic situation and the rise in the prices of educational services, for example, have made many families give up resorting to a number of specialists for a single service, or perhaps withdraw entirely from following up their children. For families, the priority now is meeting their physiological needs - this if we grant for the sake of argument that most families have enough “courage” to follow up their children with special needs at the specialized centres. Accordingly there is a group about which we know only in secret and which there is no way to help or to claim its right to learning and inclusion.
The educational system in Lebanon did not take into account at the foundation of its construction children's individual differences and needs, nor the changes that have come upon teaching amid this pandemic. Nor has it trained teachers sufficiently, especially those who work with children with learning difficulties - although this group is considered the most widespread if we return to global statistics. The British Dyslexia Association stated that people with learning difficulties alone constitute 10% of the population in Britain. And in Lebanon, which does not recognize statistics, field follow-up indicates that the number of children with learning difficulties is not negligible and constitutes a large group that deserves attention, the conducting of studies about it, and serious work on finding support and intervention programmes suited to the needs of each category of them.
Did the world not call for the necessity of attending to children with special needs by including them, teaching them and developing their skills? Were we not calling for making families aware, in campaigns - some of them promotional - of the necessity of enrolling their children in the centres concerned with them, because there are skills that can be developed only with a multidisciplinary team? What has become of the associations concerned with them, and have they replaced their works funded by international organizations with studies to develop new mechanisms for distance learning, or have they contented themselves with thinking only about how to invest their projects commercially? And is the Ministry of Social Affairs' refusal, to this hour, to cover the cost of follow-up carried out remotely due to a shortage in the budget or to a conviction that distance learning is of no use with this group?
* University lecturer
Source: Al-Akhbar newspaper
