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Friday, August 04, 2006
Roperos: Free but costly
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
A parent in a parent-teacher meeting I attended recently complained that some of the things teachers require their children to produce are adding pressure to the survival of her family. She has three children in elementary and two in high school.
I looked at her with a half smile, having known her as coming from a sitio where relatives of my wife also reside. I whispered to her reprovingly that it’s what she gets for having many children (she has two more kids not yet of school age).
But the point is not that a couple has many children. It is the inability of government to fulfill certain policies of education that have been laid down to benefit children of primary school age, like free education.
I think primary education is even more expensive to the average rural family today as it was two generations ago. The cost of primary education has grown burdensome to low-income parents in the countryside now even as the educational system appear to be much less effective in providing a tool of survival when the child becomes an adult.
I cannot recall in the past when contributions were asked other than for Red Cross and the Boy Scouts. Three elementary and two high school kids I am sort of helping out told me how expensive the “add-on” features of their daily learning instructions have become.
Free education young kids are getting from our public schools may be free in essence, but not in reality. Children are asked to buy, donate, pay or contribute just about anything.
One afternoon, they come home complaining that they have to buy materials like manila paper and pentel pen for their school project and report. On another day, they want money to buy things they need for their feeding program. And the entry of the personal computers means each child has to pay P50 every month for maintenance.
The fees, contributions, and donations vary of course from one school to another. In one high school, kids are asked to contribute money (was it P0.10?) for the water the school is getting from the barangay waterworks system. In another, children contribute a monthly amount for the light.
One afternoon, a high school student came home asking for ten pieces of bamboo splits for a project, and of course fare for her and the bamboo. And there are the notebooks kids are required to have for each subject. (They carry these, with the books, in their backpacks every day.)
Free elementary school education for kids before World War II, and right after, was truly free. The only fee I could remember asked of us was the P0.30 for the Red Cross. Fees for the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts were optional.
Today, it seems that only thing truly free is the salary of teachers, who manage to survive on what a friend would jokingly refer to it as the mentors’ “starvation pay.”
Well, given the state of this republic’s finances, it is easy to understand why public schools have to depend on their wards for the supply of materials to facilitate their learning instruction. In fact, I know of a school that had to ask donations from the kids’ parents to construct latrines in each school building.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (August 4, 2006 issue)
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