The Herald
EDITORIAL
10 March 2009
Every Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture faces a dilemma when setting school fees for State schools and considering applications for levies over and above these.
He first needs to ensure that the entitlement every Zimbabwean child has to at least 11 years of formal education is a practical and attainable entitlement, not some pie in the sky.
This means that a substantial majority of parents and guardians must be able to afford the fees, although it does not necessarily mean that they need to be able to afford them easily or without some sacrifice.
There must then be a reasonable scheme to ensure that the State can pay the fees of the minority whose parents or guardians cannot afford to pay.
But the second factor every Minister has to consider is that despite having the largest budget of any ministry, the money from the taxpayer is not enough to give every child in every State school a minimum decent education. Parents must chip in, and chip in with a substantial amount.
In the 1980s and 1990s successive ministers introduced and refined a system whereby parents who could pay more had to pay more and communities of parents who wanted to pay more for better facilities were encouraged to raise the required levies.
This allowed the ministry to allocate its extremely limited resources by need, rather than dividing them fairly among all children.
More State resources were spent on a rural child than on an urban child, and more went on children in working class suburbs than on the children of the middle classes.
This did lead to differences, sometimes marked differences, in the quality of resources at State schools but that was accepted, and there was the positive side that ever-higher standards were being created that all State schools could aim at and one day achieve.
Total equality tends to encourage total equality of mediocrity.
Minister David Coltart last week returned to those principles that had allowed Zimbabwe to race ahead of most of Africa and give every child seven years of primary education (eight years as the Grade 0 classes become common) and at least four years of secondary education with standards rising each year.
The tuition fees he set for his own State schools, ranging from zero for rural primary schools to US$70 a month for sixth forms in low-density urban suburbs, are not unreasonable.
Most families can afford the fees for the school their children are zoned for with some sacrifices and careful budgeting.
There are two problems, right now, though that the Minister needs to take into account.
Many parents earning salaries and wages, rather than deriving income from a business, have not been paid yet in hard currency although most will be so paid by the end of this month.