First published in Column 8 on the 21st of October, 1992
I was about to sit down this morning and write out a cheque for
the balance of my children’s secondary school fees when I discovered I’d
mislaid the bill. This brought temporary relief to my beleaguered debt system,
and meant I didn’t have to borrow yet more of the bank’s money to pay the
account.
Fees are only part of the problem.
Though we’d hardly regard ourselves as wealthy, by many
parents’ standards we must be reasonably well off. The fact is we have less
money now than we had before, thanks to the famous Employment
Contracts Act, and have to make it stretch further.
School teachers must be aware that most parents are now
worse off than they’ve been for years, yet they constantly require more and
more funds to cover the costs of innumerable school extras. Day after day I am
confronted by an eight o’clock in the morning demand from at least one of my children.
It gets worse as the kids get older. To its credit the
primary school seems to appreciate that parents’ spending power is reduced. Not
so the secondary school. (And I hear from other parents that most secondary
schools are the same – or worse.)
Perhaps at the school end it doesn’t seem as though there
are so many demands. But on the home front we never stop paying out for
something. Which is why this year’s fees are still unpaid.
School camps are one of the chief costs, though by no means
the only one. In a discussion with a teacher recently over one of these I was
told that the better-off parents want everything that’s available for their
kids. So the school must provide.
I understand why she feels schools are the meat in the sandwich,
but having to follow the desires of those with money means that the parents who
aren’t so well off, and the ones who are downright impoverished, have no choice
but to keep up with the Joneses. And to keep up with little or no resources.
Yes, I know there are funds available for parents who just
can’t manage to pay for their kids to go to camps. And I’m grateful for them. But
how long are these funds going to survive? We know they’re not bottomless pits
as much as we know parents’ cash doesn’t grow on trees.
You could say it’s all my fault: I shouldn’t have had so
many kids (we originally planned for seventeen). Maybe we shouldn’t have. But the
end of that argument is that no one should have more than one or two children. And
further on down the track we have this Catch 22 situation: fewer children,
fewer teachers required; more teachers out of work. (Abortion has already
caused a good deal of unemployment in the teaching industry.)
To me there’s no give in the system. We must have our children
educated, by law. This means nowadays we also have to fork out for whatever the
schools insist is part of their curriculum.
Isn’t it time the schools woke up to the economic crisis
many parents are struggling through and pulled their horns in a bit? Fewer
camps might result in kids having a little less confidence, and in their
socialising a little less. On the other hand that would give teachers more time
in the classroom.
Who knows? We might then find tertiary students who, when
they make it to university, could spell, count and comprehend.
No comments:
Post a Comment