Abstract:

A rhetorical question is answered by the report. Who was it that left disadvantaged people out of the decision-making process for online learning? When the clock struck midnight and a new dawn broke on how COVID-19 had changed the world of education, Coloured parents in the Western Cape were concerned about where to obtain a computer and how their child would be able to enter a digital classroom without access to the Internet. The Coloured community has a long history of being marginalized, with high rates of drugs, unemployment, gangsterism, school dropout, and teenage pregnancies. The Cape Flats are Cape Town's stepchild, with residents living in deplorable conditions and children growing up hearing gunshots. Schools have minimal resources, and children have only seen computers in magazines and have never touched a computer key, so when South African educational institutions moved to online classes in March 2020, the Cape Coloured communities had to find ways to ensure that their children continued to obtain an education. However, many of the children were destitute to spend time on the streets. Evidently, teenage pregnancies increased during lockdown, whereas several studies have linked teenage pregnancies to lockdown. In addition, during the lockdown, the rate of school dropout increased in the Western Cape.

This paper is investigating how the lockdown and online learning had widening the gap in education and use an ethnographic approach to collect data from a small sample that is consisting of high school principals and member from the Cape Coloured community.

Keywords:

Cape Coloured Community, teenage pregnancies, unemployment, COVID-19.