29 Years Ago
The reopening of schools last Monday has provoked a cacophony of criticism over the lack of standardization of curricula, lock of regulation of teaching credentials, and lack of financial responsibility in the valley’s mushrooming private school parents complain that private schools here often embody the most consciousness excesses of an unleashed entrepreneurial society. They argue that unregulated capitalism should be kept out of the field of education and that successive government’s close their eyes and do nothing. As usual, it is the poor who suffer the most.
A friend came to me in despair last weekend. He earns 3,000 rupees per month at the university. His two children are attending one of the less expensive private schools because there is no government school in his neighborhood. Last semester the tuition fee was 300 rupees per child. In addition, he had to pay about 300 rupees for clothes and “stationery”. Now the tuition has been raised to 150 rupees per child and clothes and needed supplies are closer to Rs 400. He is in effect, paying over half his salary to educate his children. The little he has left has to pay the rent and bye food.
People’s Review, 9 February 1995.
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