Every parent must be responsible

IT is back to school and parents and school administrations around the country have been frantically preparing for another academic year.
Despite the Government’s commitment to paying school fees for students at all levels, including a HELP programme for tertiary institutions, there will be quite a financial burden for parents and guardians for transportation, for clothes, for allowances and for school project fees.
Nothing is ever so easy.
Many students will not go to school because of inaccessible terrain or because they simply do not have a shirt on their back.
It is a reality in many rural communities that seems unreal to those of us who enjoy the luxuries presented by towns and cities.
And even in the capital, when school year begins today, there will be school-aged children tapping on windows of vehicles begging for a “wasa” or wanting to sell a betel nut.
Whatever are parents and the authorities doing about these children?
These children ought to be picked up by Child Welfare and bundled off to some school as wards of the state.
Parents who produce children like rabbits with hardly a care for the welfare of the children ought to be pulled up and made accountable.
Once the National Identification programme is complete and all persons in the country accounted for, an amendment ought to be made in the tuition fee free education policy for the State to only pick up the school fee of only three children per family.
This ought to apply to other State services such as health care and medi-care when that becomes policy. Some guy wants to marry five wives and produce a soccer team of children can take care of the rest of his children while the State only picks up the bill for three of the happy-go-lucky man’s exertions.
It is unfair for the State to pay for irresponsible people who spare hardly a thought for their actions in producing so many children.

‘When the Government treats people everywhere the same, it is also encouraging those who are average or below average, who most definitely can improve if they tried’

The tax is normally paid by the working parent who is also, because he lives by his wages, most normally the person who produces fewer children and who exercises care and responsibility in raising his children.
The working man will normally pay higher fees required by private schools or schools abroad to send his children.
There is a tendency for people to look with disdain upon such persons, declaring loudly that they are snobbish or showing off or some other derogatory term.
What these detractors do not realise is that the person who is able to afford a proper home and able to care for his family is also the person who has struggled hardest in the competitive world of primary, secondary and tertiary education and who has worked his way up to his present condition.
He is a high achiever while the detractors are normally riff-raff, whimsical, complaining and jealous persons of below-average intelligence and success.
When the Government treats people everywhere the same, it is also encouraging those who are average or below average, who most definitely can improve if they tried.
It keeps the average guy average because he will always say “government supply” and will not expand energy to improve his condition.
It is time the Government was also responsible in the manner it treats people.
It must reward success and penalise laziness, so that everybody is pushing to be successful.
Free handouts will keep a person and a nation servile and dependent forever.