If the ridiculously high fee being charged by schools is doing anything, it is to increase the expenses
KARACHI: School fees nowadays are ridiculously high. Putting such a high price on the fundamental right of education should be considered a cardinal sin. I recently heard an interesting conversation between a boy and his mother on this subject. The boy, who could not have been more than 15 years of age, was asking his mother to let him drop out of school and buy him a laptop instead. His argument being, “You’ll have to pay almost four lakhs for the next two years. Let me drop out and give my exams privately with the help of a laptop that will cost 75 per cent less than my school fees. I’ll study more with that laptop than I ever can with the absentee teachers.”
The child of only 15 years of age seemed to make more sense than half the country at this point. If the ridiculously high fee being charged by schools is doing anything, it is to increase the expenses and the blood pressure of the common man and forcing his not-yet-adult son to make decisions he is not yet ready for. A school is supposed to teach a child everything he needs to learn and apparently ‘teaching a child how to learn without a school’ is the latest trend in teaching.
Syeda Maheen Qadri
Published in The Express Tribune, April 22nd, 2015.
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