Only The First Step
NOTHING should take the shine off the Ministry of Education’s giant step to abolish school fees for grades zero to seven.
For the well-off the gesture may appear cosmetic. But for the majority of Namibians it will go a long way towards freeing up money to help their children through the school years. In this issue of The Namibian, one parent in the Omusati Region could not contain his or her joy at the fact that school fees have been abolished, as they were about to pay more than a 100 percent increase of N$90 this year. About 460 000 children in state schools will benefit from the decision.
Even in Windhoek reports still emerge of children up to about 10 years old who have not set foot in a classroom because their parents simply could not afford to send them to school. The school fees were not the only hurdle, but they were a major obstacle.
Once children had been sent home to get money for school fees, it was difficult for their struggling parents to fight “the system”. In addition, the parents could not push children to school amid their inability to meet other needs such as uniforms. A parent in Katutura once recounted to this newspaper how she gave up trying to force her 14-year-old daughter to go to school because she could not afford shoes and the girl could no longer endure the shame and the mocking from other pupils. Such is the struggle that many have to go through.
Yet it would be foolhardy for anyone to simply praise the government for a mission accomplished by making basic education free, as was required by the Namibian Constitution when it came into effect 23 years ago.
In the 1990s the government abolished pre-primary education and drastically changed the curriculum. At the time a lot of emphasis was placed on enrolling as many children into the education system as possible after decades of colonialism and apartheid which kept blacks uneducated. The negative effects of focusing on quantity rather than quality and other policies of rolling children as quickly as possible through formal education are becoming clearer and more painful to bear with the products of the system showing up too many functionally illiterate graduates.
The noble step of introducing “free education” and bringing back pre-primary state schools should be accompanied by the improvement in quality and equality.
The same reader praising the lifting of fees also laments the fact that for the duration of 2012, the Epoko Combined School in Omusati did not have a history teacher. Similar reports have circulated of mathematics, science and English teachers being in short supply. In fact, none other than Minister of Education Abraham Iyambo has warned that teacher shortages will continue at least until 2015.
Is the government really making sure that the shortages and poor quality are addressed? Many parents will be concerned whether the abolishment of school fees does not also lead to lack of basic maintenance of the schools.
We can only hope that the lifting of school fees and other contributions to schools does not send a negative message to parents and communities that they no longer have to give material support to places where their children’s future is being shaped.
Inequalities of the past further need to be evened out by targeting more funds and other resources for rural and urban poor schools, especially in areas that are densely populated.
Unless quality in all aspects, including what may seem as simple as a clean education environment, is improved, children from poor backgrounds face being condemned to a vicious cycle of poverty that their parents are trying so hard to get them out of.
Yet, without parents giving material and intangible support to schools, this major step will amount to naught.