Dear Editor,
The argument for educational dictators to be given authority to inflict pain and suffering on those members of our society whose cognitive growth has not yet crossed the threshold of concrete perceptions is essentially that discipline is essential.
Now let us apply some non partisan logic to this idea that licking people’s children will make them straight and obedient. These are humans aren’t they? They will one day grow up to be adults won’t they? Besides the physical, what other psychological changes will they go through to become an adult? And if all their growth revolves around is getting bigger physically and developing greater understanding of their environment and the social contract that binds them with it, why discontinue corporal punishment as a means of keeping them straight? After all, if it can work on them when they are young surely it becomes even more appropriate at a stage when they can fully conceptualize that what they are engaged in is wrong. You want it in a nutshell? OK. If we recommend such sanction for wrong doing and disobedience at a point in the life of a human being when they have not fully developed mental faculties, why do we cut it off after they attain the full mental capacity to know better? Or is it just because they have grown big and are capable of retaliating in kind?
Look I can recall my days as a teenager when the police would raid us under some bottom house while we were engaged in a game of rap or bone dice. Sometimes they just collected the money, the cards and the dice, and after giving us a “good talking to”, sent us scurrying home still apprehensive that our parents would find out what we had been doing. But that did not stop us from assembling again for the same purpose. The lure was more than winning. It was an addiction.
It is strange how partisanship seems to dissipate intellectual reasoning and understanding in the discussion of such issues in Guyana by Guyanese. I read somewhere where one guy who came out in favour of the Government’s proposition to legalize casino gambling remarked that although there were things like people losing their wages at gaming tables studies found no aversive social consequences that could be linked to casino gambling, or words to that effect. Okaaay, let’s see here. The guy loses his entire weekly or monthly wages. He has a wife and four kids. He goes home and tells them what happened and they all commiserate with him over his bad luck and live happily ever after. Seemingly it is not only “the Wizard of Oz’s scarecrow that is in need of a brain.
Many of us in and of Guyana are in the same boat. How stupid have we become, or even more telling, how amnesiac. Has it been so long ago that we had been witnessing the socially unappealing scenario of men packed up in those smoke filled horse racing centres around the city armed with their salaries and an uncontrollable obsession to be there. We do not track and study such things in Guyana, and if we did we would have realized that the social tragedies that accompanied that “pastime” during that era were debilitating and frightening. Men abandoned their jobs for the horses. They forgot their wives and families as, with vacant eyes and irrational cognition, they laboured over dog eared equine biographies in search of a likely quadruped on which to cast lots. I have written before that it is ludicrous for a nation incapable of coping with criminality involving violence, drugs and phantom killings to erect one more pillar of vice upon the mountainous assembly we already have. The social costs that will accrue when casino gambling becomes a reality have to be laid at the feet of those arranging it.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Williams
OAO Technology Solutions
