education and the high cost of living

school's almost here and every now and then i hear my friends, and even strangers, complain about how expensive it's gotten to put kids through school.

my officemate's children are required to buy around 3000 pesos worth of books per year. not to mention the rising tuition fees. and her kids are only in grade school. they have to buy workbooks for each subject.

workbooks are foreign to me. when we were in grade school, the school lent us the books, we copied the exercises in our notebooks, and gave the books back at the end of the school year. notebooks are much cheaper than books. plus i find the thought of writing in books abhorrent, kahit na workbooks sila.

preschool is worse. i overheard a conversation in the jeep the other day about how this woman put her son in day care because it's only 1500 pesos a year, plus a monthly fee of 75 pesos. she said the preschool she was looking at was charging something like 27000 per year for a 3 year old kid.

what's up with that? i know that children that age are only learning their abc's and colors and shapes and that they have more playtime than school time.

i remember going to nursery school when i was 5. my mom assures me that my tuition that time was nowhere near the thousands. of course that was ages ago. but still. all we did was learn our alphabet, have snacktime, naptime, playtime, then go home. wala namang makapagsasabing tanga ako.

it amazes me how these things work out lately. the tuition for a year in preschool costs more than my 4 semesters in law school... give or take a sem or two.

i've heard it said that people put their children as young as 2 years old to preschool because they have to work and school is the only place they could leave them without fear.

that's sad.

i wonder how it will be when i have kids. sigh. it's enough to give anyone a headache.