School children paying unnecessary fees

I would like to highlight the plight of one of my neighbours. This is regarding his inability to pay the expenses of his 5 school going children. He is just a mechanic earning a monthly income of just slightly over one thousand. It is indeed a big headache for him. Needless for me to say more, if you have children going to school, you should know how does it feel. He did mentioned to me how hard it is for him, having to spend at least RM300-RM400 for 1 school going child. Just imagine multiply this amount by 5!!!



Nowadays, a student is obliged to pay an average fee of RM100++. This amount is inclusive of all the fees and cost of stuff such as T-shirt, track suit, excercise books and others. It would be amateur for me to list all the items one by one.



Talking about the fees, I found that most of them are not relevant and unnecessary. What has happened to the fund allocated by the ministry to each schools? Where does this fund goes to? Why should they impose extra fees, when there are allocations especially for each schools?



Stuff such as excercise books, track suit, t-shirt just to name a few, are mandatory to be bought from the school and the prices are much higher than those sold in the shops. In the olden days, during our school days, these stuff were for us to opt to buy direct from the shops at a lower prices. Why is it that mandatory to get it from the school? I suspect that, the departments concerned must have some interest on the dealings with the supplier for the supply of these stuff, if not why should they make it mandatory for the student to get from the school.



Even school magazines are sold at an exorbitantly high prices. If you turn the pages of school magazines, you would surely found out that there are lots of advertisements. And these advertisements are not FREE!!! Full page advertisements could cost the advertisers thousands of dollars. Don’t tell me that the income from these advertisements are not enough to cover the cost of printing of these school magazines.



Looks like the schools nowadays are more concerned about making profits than educating our future generations. There are no more values in our present education system, it is not surprising nowadays even form five student doesn’t know how to spell their own names. And no wonder there are less Sarawakian kids going to universities compared to semenanjung. In olden days, even primary six pupils are qualified to be teachers, and back then, there were less corruptions.



Tags: school, social