A year ago, a Ministry of Education official had told this newspaper that it would be “another story” when the full reality of published texts becomes apparent. That ‘other story’ appeared on the faces of the shell-shocked parents gathered in the area of Giftland OfficeMax’s text book department.
We did some quick calculations. The counter clerk at Giftland told us that a book list for one of the city’s private schools would cost in the region of forty thousand dollars. The Primary Three list for the same school would cost around forty thousand dollars. The store in question didn’t have quite a few of the secondary school texts though we were able to learn that the Form Two mathematics text was being sold for five thousand five hundred dollars.
Once school reopens on Monday the state schools will begin their own distribution of text books. That is never an uncomplicated matter. All too frequently there are not enough books to go around and when we spoke with some parents in a department store about the issue of text books they all said that while the state-issued texts cost nothing it was not uncommon for children to go through am entire school year with no more than one or two books.
We discovered too that in the matter of pirated texts one swallow does not make a summer. Some of the underground outlets persist and the parents who cannot afford the cost of original texts are supporting the underground facilities. Even the established booksellers concede that pirated texts will be difficult to eradicate. It is the high and in some cases astronomical cost of original texts which, above all else, keeps the pirates in business and, the moral and legal considerations notwithstanding, the enterprise is likely to persist unless and until we find a way of making school texts cheaper for ordinary people who place a high premium on their children’s education.
