Neglected children’s plight in schools

Tatenda Makombe
EDUCATION is more than a luxury. It is a responsibility that society owes to itself, posits Robin Cook.
The Ministry of Education is working flat out to ensure education is accessible to all.
The ministry is devising programmes like Performance Lag Address Programme (PLAP) to ensure that no child is left behind. The Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Cde Lazarus Dokora, recently announced that children should not be sent home for fees collection and stated that schools should come up with other means to collect fees from parents.

All these are efforts to ensure that all children get equal opportunities to education. Parents entrust teachers with their children. It is sad to note that teachers are betraying the trust of parents and defying the ministry’s efforts by neglecting some of the children. These children are being neglected by their torch-bearers who are supposed to light their way.

In most cases these neglected children are those who come from poor backgrounds and come to school with no or tattered uniforms, those children who are not very intelligent and those whose parents are not very popular with teachers. The parents can question the competence of the teacher. For example, the parent can question why homework books are not being marked. This might not go down well with the teacher and the teacher will resort to ignoring the child.

Neglected children yearn for the teacher’s attention. The teacher pays more attention to his/her favourites in class. Even when devising the most appropriate teaching method, the teacher selects teaching methods that are most suitable for his/her most favoured children. It is saddening to note that when neglected children fall sick at school they are poorly attended to. Even the allocation of learning material is done unfairly. For example, during allocation of textbooks, the neglected children are given tattered textbooks with missing pages while the teacher’s favourites are given new ones.

Neglected children hardly get any positive reinforcement from the teacher. For example, a child might do well in a given exercise. Instead of giving positive comments, the teacher most likely says: “Aaaaah, today’s exercise was very easy even *John* has mastered it, kkkkkk . It’s unusual”. This child will feel demotivated and won’t see the need to work hard in school. The marking of books of neglected children lacks qualitative attention.

These children will most likely perform badly in school. According to a survey done at school x, neglected children come to school late and their absenteeism rate is very high. They miss out on very important concepts which in turn affect their grades.

Teachers also bruise the ego of these poor innocent children. “I offered to fetch water for my teacher when she said she was thirsty. My teacher looked at me from head to toe with a frown on her face and said, “You are too dirty to fetch the water that I drink, let*Rutendo* do the fetching!!!” My classmates laughed at me. I felt inhuman”, said a little boy I interviewed. I am sure this made the boy feel inferior to the one chosen by the teacher.

According to a survey done at school x, the allocation of tasks and responsibilities are done unfairly. Tasks like cleaning the teacher’s table and distribution of books are given to the teacher’s favourites while dirty tasks like cleaning the chalkboard and sweeping the classroom are allocated to the neglected children.

They also suffer even when it comes to co-curricular activities. These children in most cases never make the team. It is sad because no matter how talented these children are they will never go far.

Neglected children end up engaging in compensatory behaviour like bullying. These children bully those children who are receiving favours from the teacher. Neglected children are also most likely to drop out of school because they don’t feel motivated to come to school.

While it is normal that other children are generally more lovable than others, teachers should try by all means to treat all children equally and afford them equal opportunities.