The Big Read: No such thing as a free lunch
Nov 6, 2015 | Jonathan Jansen
It was one of the saddest moments of my youth - being told by my parents there
was no money to pay for me to go to university.
Jonathan Jansen. File photo. Photograph by: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Lisa Hnatowicz
"The things I learnt from student jobs have stayed with me all my life"
There were five children to feed, clothe and keep in school, and always at least one
"upcountry" relative living in the small council house, so things were tight. For as long as
I can remember, I did odd jobs to bridge the gap between the state bursary for teaching
and mere survival.
I worked as a postman's assistant on the Muizenberg to Fish Hoek run, which explains
my fear of dogs. I heard far too many Madams reassuring us, falsely, that "my dog has
never bitten anyone before" only to find myself fleeing down the road with the neatly
sorted letters flying through the air.
By far the most difficult job I did to raise funds for study was trying to clean the oil out of
a huge slab of concrete where trucks parked while being repaired in Main Road,
Retreat. My basic chemistry told me that oil does not come out of stone, but that was
the instruction. To this day the scoundrel who hired two of us has not paid his naïve
student workers.
Then there was selling fish for Uncle Japie on one of the corner streets cutting across
what is now the M5, near Muizenberg beach. The takings were meagre but the tips
helped, as did the snoek dinner made from the unsold fish.
At weekends I collected money from customers who bought "on tick" from clothing
shops along Wynberg Main Road, and then the weirdest student job of all - repairing
wooden boxes for Mr Jacobs so he could resell them to farmers for packing their fruit
and vegetables for the market. You sat all day with a hammer and nails putting these
crates together before loading them onto trucks.
I learnt a few things from these student jobs, and they have stayed with me all my life.
One, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nobody handed you a degree on a platter. I
did not beg or steal or demand money or support from anyone, least of all the
government. You had to work really hard to get it.
I also learned that, by working for my degree, literally, I came to appreciate my
education more. It was my degree and the real value of that prized qualification came
from personal sacrifice and hardship.
When I walked across the graduation stage I owed nobody anything. I felt pride that I
had worked for it and made it happen. That would translate into all other aspects of life the deep satisfaction that comes from making your own life.
Of course you had to pay back the money. For every year of funding on that bursary
you had to spend a year teaching in a public school. If you decided not to become a
teacher you were immediately liable for the full cost of the bursary. In this way the
money always returned to fund another poor student so that the system of financing
was sustainable.
Fortunately, I discovered a love for working with high school students that has never left
me, so paying back the bursary through teaching was not something I even thought
about as a biology teacher in the senior grades.
The word I have heard most often in the past few weeks is "demand". Of course you
could simply ask or request or propose, but in our culture of protest you shake your fist
and "demand" things for free. Students want more services and demand to pay less,
preferably nothing. Most of these demands are reasonable, especially for poor students.
But the question I have been pondering these last few weeks is this - what do we lose in
a culture of demands where good things must be delivered free of charge, and if that
does not happen we behave really badly?
Instead of just handing out money how about tying funding to payback commitments?
What if every grant or bursary was tied to limited student working hours in the library or
tutoring in your discipline?
Just a thought.
~oOo~