Covid-19 Pandemic and Disparity in Household Adaptations to School Lockdown: Redressing the Myth of Educational Equality

Abstract

This study investigated two variables: household inequality and adaptation to school closure during the COVID-19 school lockdown in one city in a middle-income country in Sub-Sahara Africa. The findings suggest high social and economic cost due to the digital gap particularly for less endowed households, strengthening the view that contemporary increased technologybased curricula do favour those on the positive side of the digital gap, which prevented already vulnerable children from indigent households to access remote online learning during the school lockdown. This exacerbated the already widening gap between children from high socioeconomic background and those not so endowed. The COVID-19 pandemic rehashed the myth of educational equality. Contemporary focus on technology-based curricula calls for the need to redress the embedded inequality in access and use of technology. Insights from this study suggest that persistent disparity in technology access and use as underscored by the pandemic, may have to be given the needed attention in order not to thwart otherwise good benefits of increased educational access in many countries in the developing economies.