Prohibiting Factors

Apart from the prohibiting distances from the children’s Kampungs to the schools, not all children could, in fact, go to school. Only parents who could afford to decently dress their children for school, who could financially afford and were willing to pay for schoolfees, and, who could afford the absence of their children from home for half a day everyday each week, except on Sundays, sent their children to school. In those days, as it was too with some families in even more recent times, the children were helphand assets around the house. The general schooling desires were for their children’s abilities to read and write the Kadazandazan Language of the Tangaa’ dialect, in the first place and the other Kadazandusun dialects as well, and to function a bit in the third R, arithmetics. The general tendency of the Kadazandusun mentality at that time was that their daughters need not spend many years in school. It was considered sufficient schooling for them when they were able to read and write their own names. Many of the Kadazandusun people in the past were also of the near-global openion that “the girls’ place was in the kitchen”. In the boys’ or girls’ schools, when the pupils had mastered the basic reading techniques of their Kadazandusun language, the pupils were then further trained to read cohesive words of stories from the Catholic Bible of the Old Testament which had been translated into the Kadazandusun Language of the Tangaa’ dialect. The translations were bounded into presentable thick cover story books. It was a pride and a pleasure to own and keep one in those days! That was the main, if not, the only reading Kadazandusun text available to the pupils in those days. The medium of instruction in those primary schools was the English Language as the nuns and priests who started the schools as missionary vehicles for the spread of the Catholic Faith were Europeans, some, presumably British. It could still be visualized so vividly that the first page of the Primary One English Book contained sematics and thematic illustrations depicted by the following graphics: A man A pan A man and A pan This is a man. This is a pan. The Kadazandusun class text presented the first page illustrations, as such: i Molotu om i Gusil (Molotu and Gusil) There was a schoolfee to pay to go to those schools. The schoolfee was One Dollar (in those days, the Malayan Dollar, the equivalent of One Ringgit nowadays) per pupil per month, but the Kadazandusun generalities were still finding it too much of a burden to pay. But, as it was commonly cited as an example nowadays, there were some financially capable individuals who were blessed with money but they were still unwilling to pay for their children’s schoolfees, thus depriving them of schooling in those days. Some of the rich parents who saw the importance of schooling for their children and who did send their children to schools in those trying days had left their children as well known members of the community in years following. One elderly gentleman, an otai in the 1950s, who had by now long passed on, referred to the writer as ‘a tacciturn’ and ‘an introvert’, for he was very economical with speech and the dispense of viewpoints at any discussions and gatherings. This late gentleman’s knowledge of the seldom-used English words, ‘tacciturn’ and ‘introvert’, confirmed the result of his early education and schooling. On the other hand, one schoolgirl, out of her own determinations to gain education in those days and had approached her school authorities for help, were lucky enough to gain favours from the Catholic foreign nuns. She was excused from the cash payments of her schoolfees and was only required to pay for it in the form of a few bundles of firewoods per month. She must have been spirit-bestowed with some simple humility of feeling, free of self-consciousness, from carrying firewoods to school. From St. Michael’s Primary School, it was a common sight almost every morning of pupils sent home because their parents could not or would not pay for their schoolfees. The humilation was too great for some for often a time some of those pupils, especially the bigger and the older ones, would then not turn up for school anymore.