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The immense popularity of boarding schools, despite the much higher fees charged, can be seen from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education expecting a little over a quarter of the 394 000 children who wrote Grade Seven last month to be applying for boarding places in Form One for next year.
And it is likely that more than 100 000 sets of parents would be seeking a boarding place if they could afford the fees involved.
But there are only 25 000 Form One boarding places in the public and private sectors, so only around six percent of children can attend school as a boarder with the other 94 percent going to be day pupils, regardless of the wishes of their parents, and fairly clearly there are a lot of wishes for boarding places.
Some of the huge popularity of boarding schools are driven by the variation in quality of school buildings and facilities, variations that are narrowing, but are still apparent.
Once every school has decent science laboratories, decent workshops for practical subjects, ICT labs, and a full range of academic and practical subjects, some of the pressure for boarding places will be off the schools.
In fact, with all schools offering all facilities it will be possible to reintroduce the old regulations, that pupils would live within, say, 10km or 15km of a secondary school are forbidden to board, that being within a cycle ride of less than one hour.
In those days schools had huge cycle shed complexes, with more than half of all secondary school pupils cycling as a matter of routine, and even today a reasonable cycle costs less than US$100.
If you know where to look, you can even see the routes and the eroded remnants of cycle tracks criss-crossing Harare as the then city councils tried to make cycling to school a lot safer by separating most of the cycle and motor-vehicle traffic at least on the main roads and more important roads.
Boarding school places were reserved for the children of farmers and those who had to work in rural areas, and even then if you farmed on the outskirts of a city or town your children went to day school.
But restoration of such a system, reserving boarding places for distant learners, does require that parents will not see a need to send a child a fast distance from home in order to have access to decent facilities.
The present drive by the Government, backed by others and backed by devolution funds, is accelerating once again the provision of the extra facilities at schools that are deficient, and this is helping to equalise education opportunities.
The second reason for boarding is also rational and reflects a need as well as a desire.
Some people live just too far from a day school and the commuting distances are long.
In fact many rural households where parents at present could simply not afford a boarding place would probably benefit if they could board, or at least be a weekly boarder if the school as just in the nearest town.
There are also parents who believe that the child will do better at a boarding school, having access to better facilities and certainly better supervision and help than there could be at home, and being immersed in a school environment throughout the term.
This might be especially important in single parent households or those where there are serious medical or other reasons at home that make it better for the child to be at school permanently.
To some extent the cachet of a boarding school arose during the colonial era. While white children were mostly cycling day pupils, most of the best black high schools were run by churches or were one of the very few run by Government, and many of these were designed as boarding schools with pupils drawn from a large area of the country.
We were then very far from the ideal that every child should have a guaranteed school place, something that only came through at independence, and so it was natural for the brightest and the best to conglomerate at the few high schools and board. That created an attitude that these schools were the best schools.
And then we have the reasons for boarding that are not so altruistic. First we have parents who simply do not want to be bothered with the details and the time required to be good parents of school going children, having to make sure regular meals are served, that there is a place at home where the children can study with supervision, that there is someone who can help with homework, and that as car ownership continues to accelerate that help is given with transport.
Raiding a child can be time consuming and parents ought to find the time.
There are some very expensive “international” schools in some countries designed for the very wealthy and where children are just dumped for someone else to look after, including many of the shorter school holidays. They cater for bad parents with money.
The other reason that is less altruistic arises from a curious Victorian concept in Britain and the British Empire when there was a dramatic expansion in the all-boarding high-fee school, misleadingly called public schools although they were not State schools.
These were seen as where the children of the aristocratic and commercial elite would go, be walled off from the larger society, would be taught a single dialect of English with a single accent, and would be inculcated into the mores and beliefs of the elite.
They would officer the armed forces, form what was termed the ruling establishment, provide most of the professions, and would run the Empire and rule the rest of the British and all the colonial peoples.
Almost all other countries, and even empires, found this curious and to this day the boarding school culture is largely absent in most countries that were never part of the Victorian British Empire.
Americans, Germans, French and the like all go to day schools, and make sure that these do offer the minimum standards of education that they want for their children with the parents pushing political leaders and the like hard to make sure that they do.
Wealthy parents in these countries will spend more on education, but largely on computers and books for the home and perhaps on tertiary education.
To some degree those cultural attitudes of the British self-proclaimed elite have permeated Zimbabwe, and this concerns many responsible for education in the country as the creation of a culture that divides people into “them” and “us” is seen as undesirable.
We need to retain boarding places, as there are so many who actually need them, we cannot stop parents with more money from seeking the best for their children, but we should be able to do so on practical grounds, not on trying to recreate a local equivalent of what some in Britain see as their ruling class.
Online Reporter