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Daylight robbery in schools

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So, in order to make sure the teachers don’t strike and stop coming to work- parents of pupils at a primary school in Marlborough have been literally gypped into agreeing to fork out $100 million per child every Monday to cater for the teachers’ transport, and $400 million every Thursday for stationery.

I can understand the $100 million per child contribution towards the teachers’ transport but $400 million every week for stationery? Maybe its just me but, in class typical class of say, 35 children, multiply that by 400, just for the teacher’s stationery every week? For me, a teacher’s stationery constitutes chalk, markers, pens and probably a few notebooks, and those cost 14 billion every week? Man.

As we head towards the run- off, I sincerely hope the ‘government’ will once more consider teachers among the list of potential recipients of the huge payouts that they traditionally dole out towards elections. Most parents just cannot bear the costs and really, most parents who have no choice don’t know where to lodge their complaints in this regard. Already they are forking out so much as school fees. This is daylight robbery and the NIPC or the Ministry ought to do something about this. What is most nauseating about the whole thing is the business of holding the children’s education to ransom in order to cow the parents into submitting to impossible, unnecessary and egoistic demands.

Speaking of pupils, a colleague in our office was just pointing out how it must be for the maths pupils whose textbooks still carry stories and mathematical problems in cents. Picture them trying to solve a problem where James and John have twenty cents between them and how much each one gets in a country where coins no longer exist and cent has been replaced by billion. One can just imagine a young pupil asking, “What’s a cent?”

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