By Frank Gashumba
Stand up and be counted. Schools don’t own our children. It has bothered me for a while, when you browse all search engines, a kindergarten is a place where kids go and have fun. If it’s a place where kids should go and have fun, why would our toddlers wake up at 4:30am to go to school? Surprisingly, some parents after preparing the kids for school and the van picking them up, they go back to their beds and sleep. To a certain extent some parents don’t even see their kids when they are going to school because they are prepared by maids and helpers.
It’s a common norm in Kampala, the van will pick these toddlers from different areas for example Munyonyo, Mbuya, Luzira, Nansana and drop them to Namirembe road where the school is and by the time the kids reach, they are already exhausted. Parents must raise up and stop this madness.
There is a new tendance of lower primary kids for example P.1 and P.2 having weekend classes. When do these kids participate in extra extracurricular activities fore example football, netball etc? If I am to recall during our school days, after each period we had playing time for example after break, we had 30 minutes of play and an hour after lunch and we go back to class.
Which school in kampala still does that these days? Homework started as a joke and now it’s a norm where these kids are given homework on a daily basis.
When do these kids ever rest. Look at a primary kid who leaves home at 5:30am and returns at 8:00pm and still has homework they need to do.
I remember very well during our O’ & level in Masaka Aghkan Senior Secondary School. Sometimes I pass via Greenhill primary school and find our kids with heavy bags on their backs as if they are pilgrims on a pilgrimage. This subjects kids to depression at such an early age due to their minds being over worked.
What is even more painful is that these kids are not being taught to be innovative, it’s plain cram work of the same things over and over again.
If taking these kids to school very early in the morning results into high innovation and developments, the social media apps like Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and search engines like Chrome, Google among others would be developed by Ugandans which is not a case in point.
Finally, during our days at school, they used to tell us “to be at the right place, at the right time and doing the right thing” and if it’s so, why is it that when kids break off for holidays, they are still given holiday packages and sometimes holiday coaching.
