By: Kebba AF Touray
Sidia Jatta, the National Assembly Member for Wuli West has called for the productive utilization of the minimum resources available to the State to educate Gambian children, instead of building Schools within every three kilometers, with fewer children to attend.
Jatta said this on Tuesday March 19th 2019, at the first ordinary session of the National Assembly in the 2019 Legislative year, during the question and answer session between Legislators and the Minister of Basic and Secondary Education, Claudiana Cole.
“In normal circumstances, every village should have a School and my normal circumstance here means when the populace has fully grabbed the essence of education, and every child goes to School. But we live in a situation where that is not the fact,” he said.
Jatta urged that the minimum resources be utilized judiciously because Schools are not built for sake of building them, but for the dispensation of education. He added that what is happening is there are beautiful structures everywhere with multiple grade teaching in a class.
“So for me that is a waste of resources and we are not using our resources strategically, neither are we dispensing education strategically. It means that something fundamental is wrong .And we are not judiciously using our resources, because we do not need those Schools, because there are no children,” he added.
Jatta urged that a balance be struck between the productive use of resources and the dispensation of education to avert wastage of resources in a situation wherein there will be too many Schools with fewer children. This he said, can be achieved when the significance of education is inculcated in the minds of the public (children), so as to achieve the objective of the idea of the three kilometers per School which started with the former regime, resulting in the construction of many Schools with fewer children.
