COMMENT | Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik recently announced that students will wear black school shoes instead of white ones, beginning next year. According to him, this was one of many requests received by his ministry.

Reading the news, I was reminded of my own white Pallas school shoes back when I was a primary school student in the 80s.

At the time, I had only one pair of school shoes which I had to scrub, dry and whiten over the weekend. And even then, my mum would inspect them to make sure I had done a good job.

You see, my mum had her own idea of how the school shoes should be cleaned. First, I had to rub leftover pieces of used bars of soap all over my shoes. Then, I had to leave the shoes inside a bucket for a while to allow the soap to work its magic.

And then, I’d use a plastic brush on the shoes to remove the dirt – this was the most annoying process as the stubborn dirt on my shoes used to hurt my arms so badly. After washing and drying the shoes, I’d finally apply some shoe whitener on them.

I remember asking my mum why I couldn’t throw my dirty school shoes into the washing machine like most of my friends, clearly explaining to her that technology was meant to make our lives easier.

However, Mum warned me never to do so as it could damage my canvas school shoes – and if that happened, Dad would be forced to spend money to get me a new pair...