"Scott? Don't worry with Scott, nah. Scott is a doctor."Scott was ten; he was no doctor. A buck-toothed boy sitting behind me in the second row of Standard Five, he was perhaps the quietest boy in class albeit not the brightest. Yet he was also the regular focus of ridicule not by the students but by the teacher. Why? Because he didn't go to lessons by "Sir."
Maybe it was because of sir's ridiculing of Scott about lessons, maybe it was the large cup of dhal he drank at every after-school lessons class, or maybe it was one of the several days he asked a relative of mine who had access to a photocopying machine to make copies of a practice test for the class (for free) and then charged every single student money for the copies, including me.
It was one of those things that made me do some extra math to calculate just how much money sir was making. And I came up with a figure: more than double his actual salary.
That was really, for me, when I began realising how expensive education really was.Most everything we had to do in primary school involved parental payment. Outfits for march past on Sports Day, Carnival costumes of Bristol board and glitter, class parties at the end of the term, even the very practice tests we had to do every week before Common Entrance.
I remember one time when I had to beg–and fake a cry–to get the $20 bus fare to go with my Standard One class to the circus. Times were harder back then and nothing came free.
More fees every year
High school was worse. Every morning at "assembly" we'd hear about the cost of the ceiling fans, of football uniforms, of the security guard, of paper. And every year there was a new cost to students. Security fee for the guard in the bus driver uniform. Stationery fee for handouts. Money for report books and hymn books and "special" copybooks. The dreaded "donation sheet" for the annual bazaar that forced boys to bang on neighbourhood gates only to be chased away by dogs.
Money for currycue. Money for costumes. Money for a new fan. Hell, at one point, they started charging a fee of $1 every time you were late...not with a library book but if you arrived to school after the bell. I was able to get a $100 bill to flash at the security guard in the bus driver uniform who, of course, never had $99 change.
Then, of course, there were after-school lessons. Back then, lessons made all the sense in the world because it was part and parcel of school life. For us in the "prestige schools" doing ten and 12 CXC subjects, it meant lots and lots of lessons. Whole private buildings were constructed to host lessons. Sometimes, it was at the teacher's house but the cost was the same.
And while I recall only one teacher, a French teacher, actually sacrificing a lunch hour every week to offer extra help for free, a few others, in a repeat of Standard Five, would actually say "we'll continue this topic in lessons."School was expensive. I had just enough perspective to realise that an immoderate amount of money had to come from parents' pockets to support their children in a land where education was supposed to be free.
I lacked sufficient perspective to see just how massively wrong it was for parents to have to fork out so much in ever-increasing, unregulated fees.
More examination needed
As time progressed and the country got wealthier faster, students in Form Six would compete for parking space with the staff. At the same time, the government began providing more free stuff to students across the country, like copy books plastered with ministry logos and ministers' photos.
Still, even today, nearly 20 years after Scott and I wrote Common Entrance, some schools apparently are charging "registration fees" when admitting incoming Form One students. While the Minister of Education no doubt is right in saying this fee is anomalous, perhaps a little investigation, ie a phone call or two to ask why, might be helpful.
Despite his claim that funds allocated to school are not being used up, it obviously takes more than the $750,000 to $1.5 million annually allocated to schools to support a year of instruction to perhaps a thousand students.
The additional financial burden on not just the "poor parents" but all parents, is unwarranted and has gone unchecked for far too many decades. Like everything else in this country, education needs more attention. And the minister and others can start with calculating just how much the average parent really spends to send his or her child to school and see if that is reasonable in the land of free education.