It’s been 2 years since students officially wore their school uniforms. It’s been a while since students took their seats inside the classrooms. Online learning has filled in the hole, the pandemic has created in our education system. And now that reinstating face-to-face classes is being dug up, the door to light has revealed itself again.

 

However, It brewed a lot of comments on the internet after the Department of Education expressed its optimism regarding the country’s transition to limited face-to-face learning modality for the school year 2022-2023.

 

On December 6 last year, public and private schools in different provinces joined the pilot run of the said modality, with 287 schools in total nationwide. This number, however, is just a fraction of some 60,000 public and private schools in the country.

 

This announcement by DepEd slowly gained support among individuals, however, the wind takes a different blow when news about the COVID-19 Omicron Variant entering the country has surfaced. Negative opinions about the danger it might bring to students arose together with the new COVID-19 cases that pushed some LGU’s in the country to switch back to alert level 3.

 

For almost 2 years now, the country’s education has suffered beneath its supposed-to-be quality, with a lot of students and teachers struggling to connect and communicate. Compared to pre-pandemic education, students nowadays have less interaction among each-other, as well as to their mentors, which is an essential in learning. Student activities that require physical contact that should have fueled every student’s desire to study have been limited, and if not all, almost every task had gone virtual.

 

These negatively affected the country’s educational quality, with its online and virtual classes being questioned on authenticity and effectiveness. Terms like “academic burnout”, “zoom fatigue” and “academic break” have been viral online every so often ever since the country has switched to virtual learning. This is why amid the pandemic, and the danger it might bring, the government is slowly pursuing what we’ve lost 2 years ago.

 

To sacrifice today’s education means putting the future of the country at risk. According to experts, the longer students stay in this kind of learning, the more they wouldn’t want to go back to face-to-face setup. This is clearly manifested when a lot of students online are complaining about reconducting the said modality without even concrete reasons.

 

Meanwhile, to back students up for the upcoming limited face-to-face setup, the government has been pushing them to get vaccinated and protect themselves from COVID-19. This is one way to assure and guarantee the learners’ safety while they start to get into their crowded classrooms again and wear their uniforms like what they used to.

 

To sum this up, Philippines, though continuously developing, is known for its global competitiveness, aiming for top spots in different aspects. And now that Philippines, is one among the only two schools in the world who have not yet resumed classroom classes, until when are we going to let students, teachers, parents, schools and the entire country suffer?