School fees nowadays are ridiculously high. Putting such a high price on the fundamental right to 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 hundred thousand rupees for the next two years for my education, if you 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.”
A 15 years old child has more sense than half the country at this point. If the ridiculously high fee, being charged by schools is only to increase the expenses and the blood pressure of the common man, 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.
SANA ABDUL KHALIQ,
Karachi, April 23.