Pack to school special

(Photo: El Noroeste)

It’s that time of year again.  School starts next week, and there are stories in the media this time of year about charities providing school supplies and backpacks to poor kids.  Education is free and compulsory (and, in a change that is radical, school attendance next year will be mandatory through High School), but… kids normally have to bring their own supplies.  With a national curriculum that even private schools have to follow, every fifth grader in the country needs a protractor and nearly every Junior in High School a tee-square.

Parents’ committees — which are a powerful lobbying group in Mexico — set the rules for each individual school.  Most require uniforms, and nearly all require the kids to have a backpack.  Following the one and only school shooting Mexico ever had (and it was more or less accidental.  A kid brought his grand-dad’s pistol to school to show his buddies, dropped it, and winged another kid.  Grand-dad went to the pokie for a couple of days apparently for not smacking his grandson up the side of the head for snooping around) there was a fashion for schools to require see-through plastic backpacks, and many schools still require every kid to open their packs for inspection every morning.

The proposed national defense budget for 2008 is 3.2 billion dollars.  Federal spending on education is normally about a quarter of the Federal budget, about 46 billion US dollars in 2004 (I got lazy and used Wikipedia).   But, that doesn’t include backpacks.