Is someone reaping a profit?

Editor: As the new school season approaches I have had a number of parents asking me why they have to buy books, year after year, that their secondary school children, in the course of the school year, are never asked to refer to or use. This is not just now, just this year, but this seems to have been going on for many years, not at one school but at many if not all secondary schools throughout the island.{{more}}

Parents are given book lists, they buy the books and then their children are never asked to use some of them or even to refer to them. What is that all about? Who or what entity generates the “BOOK LIST”? What is its imagined purpose? Are some schools required to abide by this list, or are no schools? To the schools, is this list simply “suggestive” and if so why does each school not pare it to their own requirements, issuing their own specific list?

We are talking here about hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on school books by people who have trouble putting bread on the table—books not used or read by their children. Aside from the booksellers, who is benefitting? Is this a Government boondoggle or is someone somewhere reaping a profit? It isn’t the students and it isn’t their parents! If a book is required to be bought, it should be required to be used!

HJA