The problem with school

School. The very name suggests stability, community, institution, one of the pillars of society and the place of many personal memories.
As early as the age of three, families and guardians start drawing up plans on which nursery school to enroll us in as soon as the new school year begins.
One of the major sources of friction between couples is the woman complaining about the man refusing or neglecting to pay school fees. In court child custody battles, the question of who of the two will pay the children’s school fees features prominently.

Some of the most humiliating memories many people carry with them into adulthood are of the times they were sent away from school because their parents had not paid school fees.
Many Ugandan girls in their calculation over whose hand in marriage to accept usually have an eye on if their prospective husband will be able to pay the children’s school fees.
Since the mid-1970s, it stopped being the natural course of events that once one completed university, technical college or secondary school, one got a job.

Starting in the 1980s, the term “technical-know-who” became the term for the fact that it was no longer enough to have academic qualifications; one had to know an official in a government ministry, corporation or business to help “fix” one’s child.
In the 1990s, companies started placing adverts in the newspapers simply to show that they had advertised the job and so whoever was given it had got it on merit.
But unknown to the public, somebody already working for the company had been given the job or a friend of a friend had been given the favour.

With over 30 universities in Uganda today, jobs have become so much harder to find, part of which explains the 83 per cent official youth unemployment rate.
School, then, is no longer an automatic route to employment or “a better future”.
In fact, given how much of education has been privatised in Uganda since the early 1990s, school in strictly financial terms is now the leading cause of poverty among households.
It is like investing millions of shillings in manufacturing a product for which there is no market or demand. Up to 1992, university education was free for all Ugandans so even when one graduated and went for a year or two without a job, at least one had got their education free.

Today, one drains the family of its little finances and on graduating one has no job, will not have one for years to come or when they get one it is far less than a university degree required.
To put it bluntly in business terms, school is a loss-making enterprise. It no longer even gives us the prestige it once did. A university degree, like being a Member of Parliament, long ago lost its mystique in urban Uganda.
In the next 10 years, a university degree will be like owning a WhatsApp or Facebook page: everyone has one and that means nothing.

Given this changed situation, why do so many parents and guardians continue to struggle and drain themselves poor to pay school fees?
Why do we behave like the Middle East and African migrants who set off for Europe on shabby boats, and when they survive the drowning end up in city slums and ghettos and fail to get the euros and dollars they had been told Europe’s streets are paved with, yet even after knowing this, more and more continue to head to Europe?
Obviously then from our assumptions it is clear that school stands for much more than an institution that educates children and prepares them to take up future positions of responsibility in society.

School, alongside church, clan, family and tribe is one of those pillars of society that define our very being. It is viewed as a social institution and experienced that way.
It is shameful to be known as illiterate. Political offices above a certain level require academic qualifications. A public figure who cannot speak English is mocked and laughed at.
School is like social media. Somehow, one has to join and be part of it. Years on Facebook or Twitter have not brought the vast majority of people any tangible benefits and most are passive onlookers as others post, share, re-tweet and comment. But there is no way one dare not be on social media in this day and age.
That is what school stands for, when one really thinks about it.