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TEACHER PERCY SAY…

Jun 13, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

There are many parents who are not sending their children to school. There are many primary and secondary school children who are not attending school because they know that no action will be taken against them by their schools or by their parents.
If you pass by many of the markets around the country, you are bound to see children who are supposed to be in school but who are hanging around the various vendors. There was even a case recently, where a mother has a baby in a cardboard box while she sold at a road corner.
Not many people who saw this were protesting, even though many of them would have been disgusted that the baby had to have been in a cardboard box.
If you ask some people they will say that the reason why the mother had the child with her is because she has no other option. That is pure nonsense. She has the child with her because she can get away with it, not because she cannot do better.
There are many children who are not going to school because they know they can skulk from school and not worry about their parents’ reaction. Their parents obviously do not put a value to education and prefer to be doing their own thing rather than ensuring that their child is in school.
There may be cases where a parent cannot afford to send the child to school because the child may lack clothing or books. But these are usually isolated cases and should not be entertained too often. If you are serious about educating your child, you will make the effort to ensure that the child attends school regularly.
If children do not go to school what is going to become of them? They will not have an education, and therefore, they will end up having to do physical work. But the very fact that they are not interested in going to school, suggests that they may equally not be interested in working. It is not hard to imagine the sort of professions that they will likely gravitate towards.
Many children are also not even registered for school. Therefore, even if the school to which they attend has a system of tracking those children who are absent, the school is not likely to have the resources to contact the parents or find the absentee child.
This is where collaboration between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Protection can make a difference. The two ministries should combine and work out a system whereby, if a child who is registered is not attending school and the best efforts of the schools’ administrators fail to find out why this child is not attending school, then the matter should be handed over to the Ministry of Social Protection who should go after the absentee child, in the same way as they believe, that they are going after victims of human trafficking.
But what is going to happen with those children who are not even registered? In those cases, the schools have no way of knowing that a child is being kept away from the classroom. This clearly is not a problem that can be addressed by the schools. It has to be addressed by the Ministry of Social Protection or some agency within the Ministry of Education devoted to ensuring that children are not kept away from school.
It is high time that greater attention is paid to all those children who are hanging around the markets and road corners when they should be in school
I saw one recently and asked him why he was not in school. He said he had exams. I asked him what type of exams and he said end of term exams. I reminded him that those exams have not started as yet. He has learnt to tell lies early. Who knows what next he will learn to do by staying away from school?

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