His essay Covid-19 Pandemic: A Barometer for Moral and Ethical Behaviour Among Students was about the change in students’ behaviour or the lack of it because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus was on the morals and ethical dilemmas that have been brought to the fore by the pandemic.
“My essay was to show if there was a moral decline on the students’ side. I wanted to paint a picture of what was permissible behaviour and what was not while we were in the middle of a crisis."
Dladla says his biggest motivation was the observation of the situation was from when students were sent back home for an early recess, to studying online with limited resources. He also wanted to highlight the challenges of online learning, financial issues, and the returning of students to campuses.
“These were the three burning issues for me which could have led to students’ behaviour changing for better or for worse. I also wanted to highlight factors that could lead to those behavioural changes during the pandemic,” he adds.
“The lockdown exposed a lot of issues that affected most people’s behaviours towards others: our treatment of each other as people changed – in some cases for better in others for worse. A lot of corruption was exposed and on the other side most people were doing all they could to help others. All of these spoke directly to morals and ethics.”
“I saw that as a country and as a human race, our morals and ethics were challenged and tested. As students, we were not exempt from all of this, to a certain extent we were in the middle of it because the education sector was one of the most affected sectors in our country. I looked around me for motivation to write this essay.”
Dladla won a gift voucher from Exclusive Books to the value R1000, a pen and a diary. He’s already used his voucher and even gifted the other two finalists with a book each.
@ Story by Cleopatra Makhaga. Pictures @ChrisplPhoto.