Junior Heavy Lifting

I fetched my niece from school the other day and as I sat waiting I watched these children walk to their parent’s cars straining under the weight of their school bags. Some were hunched under the load of not just one, but three bags – a school bag, a homework bag and a sports bag. These must have easily weighed thirty or more kilos. And if you consider that’s the actual weight of some of the children themselves, it’s not ideal.

 
But why are children lugging around these heavy bags?

 
From an educational point of view, we live in a country where schools are not well equipped in terms of lockers and so on and children share classrooms – we don’t have the luxury of having every child allocated a desk that belongs to them for the time that they are at school.

 
And what do the norms and standards around school infrastructure say? Perhaps lockers or lock up desks should be built into it, because that is the practical part of the daily lives of children. They have to carry books. Has anybody thought about that? Have they looked at infrastructure at schools and said “we need to have a science lab, we need to have a library and we need to have a computer room” but maybe there are things that affect our children that we need to look at more closely.” Maybe let’s put the children at the centre of our education and ask the question: “What would make their lives better?”

 
And it can start from simple things like not having to haul a bag-load of books with them every day. If you think about it in the rural context, some of those kids are walking one, two, three, often four or five kilometres to school every day carrying these books. They’re not being dropped off in a 4 X 4. So let’s make it simple and not painful for them to go to school.

 
So simple things like lockers or a lockable desk might make their lives a lot easier. At the moment, from the many parents I chatted to about this, their kids are distracted by lower back pain, which makes it difficult to concentrate in class.

 
I chatted to chiropractor Kyle Deutschaman of M & D Health and Dr Bruce Thomson from Health at 202 and both agree that there can be long-term impact if this continues.

 
Bruce says carrying these weights can be like a repeated stress sports injury and because the child’s bones are soft and not fully developed, abnormalities can form. And if abnormalities form early on and are not fixed, it has the potential to impact that child for the rest of his life.

 
Kyle says that most schools only allow non-satchel bags which change the weight bearing points. So your centre, which is your spine, is no longer your centre. He says this can result in muscular imbalances, general postural problems and malalignment.  

 
For the children themselves, they say there’s the risk that they will lose their bags with all their books so they tend to carry it around with them, even during lunch breaks, with the absence of lockers. So if the child is going to be at the school for five years then he or she should be allocated a locker for those five years so they have a place that they can claim as their own.

 
So what’s the plan? Everyone is always harping on about technology and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and how they should give each child a tablet and things like that. But what about some of the basic things like desks with lids that you can put your textbooks into?

 
Panyaza Lesufi, the MEC for Education in Gauteng is on this big drive to provide every child in the province with a tablet. The plan is to pre-load all the text books on to this tablet as e-books which is a great initiative. But there are also problems with that, for example connectivity is a big issue in the country. So it’s all very well to provide a tablet, they must be able to access them. Or they could make them readable off-line.
 
There’s also a national initiative called Operation Phakisa, which focuses on ICT’s in education and it brings together government, business and civil society to try and solve the problem of information and communications technology in schools or e-education (electronic education).

 
You won’t let your children push heavy wheelbarrows filled with bricks up and down the road because it will impact their bodies negatively, yet no one says anything about these heavy bags. Are we not abusing children by allowing this to happen? We need to be very conscious about what we’re putting our kids through in terms of future problems or future strain. The size and frame of these children are not equipped to handle this strain.

 
If you believe your child’s body is impacted by the strain of the weight of his or her school bag, what are the solutions?
 
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.