Putting small hands to work

The other day I was getting my car serviced on the rare day when my driver is gone and my cleanliness streak was rearing its head. I left the car at my favorite place and made a round of the shops nearby..when i returned they were just finishing up and I sat inside the care as they did. There was a young boy doing some work and I asked him something and discovered that he was the son of the person doing the car wash. i asked him how old he was and he replied that he was fifteen. I asked him which class he went to and he said i have never gone to school. I was surprised and asked him why, and he told me that his family had never sent him to school. I told him that if he wanted to start studying i could help him. He agreed and told his father. His father came to me and said, he is our only son. We definitely tried to send him to school but he wouldn't study. So I put him to work with myself. I could see that he was lying, because the son was willing, and if the father wanted him to study he would have jumped at the opportunity of free education for his son. But evidently, this was not a priority for him as the boy was working and earning him money.

Such attitudes are pervasive all over our society. Girls and boys are not sent to school for different reason, but the most common is that they, as well as women, are treated by heads of families as assets and possessions, extra hands to work, extra hands to earn. Beset with difficult financial circumstances, our society's lower tier is forced to look at the short term and makes do with available resources, and human resources are the easiest to access. Some do not send girls to school because of finances, security, societal prejudices against women's education or any of the above. Many parents want to educate children but cannot. Many are not convinced that it would benefit them.  There is a need to convince them that education is important. More important is to create an enabling environment where parents can send their children to school, and where they have to.

While private sector, charity organizations or even government led organizations can only do so much to ease the financial burden of the families, the effort to send more children to school cannot be successful without successful enforcement of child labour laws by the government, and to have a system of sending children to school compulsorily latest up to primary level. Without government getting serious about enforcement, rather than only incentivizing school going children, small hands will continue to hold tools of work, mops and dusters, rather than books and copies.