Once I asked my daughter, who was in elementary school at the time: “Who sweeps the classroom and cleans the desks and chairs in class?” My daughter replied: “We have a janitor at school.”
This is different from our generation of students nearly 40 years ago. Every day we had to be on duty, we had to bring a broom and dustpan from home and do the work of sweeping the classroom and washing the rags voluntarily because everyone did it. From class work to housework became a habit.
Recently, there was a story in Hanoi that caused a stir. The story was that the homeroom teacher of a class in a suburban school asked parents to contribute 500,000 VND/month to hire school workers to clean instead of letting the students do it themselves. Notably, she stated that if the parents did not agree to contribute money, the parents themselves would have to take turns going to their children's classrooms to clean on the weekends.
So many different opinions arose. Some parents agreed, some did not. Those who objected said: “Classroom cleaning includes sweeping the classroom or washing the blackboard eraser, watering the plants, sweeping the hallway... students can completely do it to practice self-discipline, discipline and responsibility to the community. I do not agree with hiring someone to do this work for the children.”
The school confirmed that there was no directive regarding the request to allocate funds to hire janitors.
According to the school leaders, they only hire cleaning services for common areas outside the classrooms and parents “don’t have to pay a single penny” and have never required parents to come to clean the classrooms or pay monthly cleaning fees. However, the school also informed: “In previous school years, some parents commented that the students were too young to be on duty, so the parents’ committee of each class spent 500,000 VND/month to hire someone to clean the classrooms. This was an agreement between the parents and the cleaners, not a school policy.”
That is just a story, in reality, in many schools, people are hired to clean for the children. Many parents even agree with this because they think that their children only need to focus on studying.
In fact, students need to do some work such as sweeping the classroom, washing the rags, and rearranging the tables and chairs. These are tasks that train independence, diligence, and especially discipline in a collective environment. These trainings will be very useful for them to grow up.
