Monday, March 8, 2004
JOACHIM BUWEMBO
A Little Book Learning is a Dangerous Thing, But Too Much Kills
At the airport arrivals section, it is perfectly normal for a traveller to emerge with their wheeled luggage and head to the back of a cab, where the driver heaves the heavy case into the open trunk. The passenger then slumps into the backseat of the car, tired out, as the driver starts the engine.
This is a common scene at airports, right? Well, it�s now also a common scene in town. You no longer need to travel 36 kilometres to Entebbe airport to see this scene. You can see it every afternoon outside any school in Kampala city. In this case, the "passengers" are small bodied, the males in shorts, the females wearing brightly coloured cotton dresses. They all wear black shoes and long stockings. Many are missing a tooth or two. They don�t need to give their address to the driver who picks them up. The driver usually owns the house where the passenger is going.
When your average primary school pupil steps out of the house in the morning these days, she is like a mobile bookshop. Her bag contains 10 to 20 kilos of books. It is the alarmingly lopsided gait many pupils are acquiring from carrying heavy book bags that is forcing more and more parents to buy wheeled cases for their kids.
Where it all began is not hard to trace. But like all issues that are not priority, the education authorities are not about to make any studies with a view to giving guidelines on how the young ones should handle their daily burden.
In the past, there used to be lockable drawers in the classrooms. That must have been when the numbers were manageable. Even in village schools, every pupil had a desk to themselves where books that were not needed over the evening would be locked away. Today, a desk with a lid that can be locked is an antique that many kids have never seen. And with an average of over 100 kids a classroom, allocating lockers to each child is physically impossible and financially untenable. So the kids have to move around with tonnes of books on a daily basis.
But why not carry only the books needed for that particular day, every perplexed parent has asked their child. The answer comes promptly: you cannot tell which books will be required. Is there no timetable? In answer to that, the parent is told about the ever-changing situation in the class, where teachers switch lessons and impromptu tests are given with only a brief notice to consult one�s notes.
So everyone has resigned themselves to the situation of bookstores being carried on soft-boned shoulders to and from the city�s hundred and one schools. The only people who are not complaining are the sellers of the large, strong schoolbags. There is a whole street devoted to selling these bags, quite close to the main taxi park. What with universal primary education, there is a bag for everybody, depending on their incomes. Invest in schoolbags and you can�t go wrong.
With the release of exam results around this time of year, the expected pressure on kids in the candidate classes mounts and the number of books required increases. And with millions of more kids now enrolled in primary schools to compete for the few government sponsored places in secondary school, more books become urgently required.
So this year, the average bag cannot carry all the books a candidate needs. Only a wheeled case will do. Next time you drive past a school in Kampala in the evening, look out for the weary travellers tugging wheeled cases across the road to the parking lot, and please don�t honk at them; they are operating under tremendous pressure.
Joachim Buwembo is editor of the Sunday Vision of Kampala
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