The Song of the Expensive Alphabet

For many years in our rainy dominion, In the wide blue southern sea, we had some strange outdated habits, we operated a thing known as a society. 

We all of us lumped in together, to pay for things we thought were required, to teach children to spell words and add numbers, it helped when they came to get hired.

But book learning comes with its problems, for when you start learning the workers to read, they can become somewhat harder to handle, they get uppity and want things for free.

Like schools for their children and clean water, roads that run straight and hospitals too – the poor kids start to compete with the rich kids, and that is something that just will not do.

So the people who runs things decided, we needed reform of the economic kind, and they decided to charge all the youngsters, thirty grand to improve their young minds.

The language they used was appealing, they’d make us all rich and tax free, with TVs and credit cards and travelling first class, with a man leading the way known as Key.

Well, the problem with the flightless Kiwi, (I refer to the humanoid kind) is that we always admire a bargain, but this bargain has stung our behinds.

Because the young folk don’t know what a debt is, it’s just a pretty row of zeroes on a bill, but by the time they have houses and babies, then that bill in the drawer makes them feel increasingly ill.

The funny thing about charging the students to get their university degrees, is that the people who are doing the charging, got their diplomas for pretty much free.

And when this noble middle aged generation, they belonged to both National and Labour Party, got to the part they were earning big bikkies, they decided to charge the next bunch a fee.

These things have a habit of spreading, like rabbits with myxamatosis disease, so the next thing we knew we had coin operated meters for toddlers learning to say thank you and please.

The old state school it is boring and makes no one profits, so we reintroduced cream filled donuts and pies, because if the pupils live too long and live healthy, the cost of paying their pension becomes rather high.

The final installment in our brave new future, was suggested by a smart CEO, to start invoicing pupils for learning their letters, 10 cents per vowel except more for a capital “O”.

So now things are back where they started, with the peasants kept out of the scene, they don’t do the higher education, they are kept in the dark and kept lean.

A sad thing about this whole fable, is that once education was free, but when you start punishing the young for learning, you end up with a halfwitted country.