Violence in schools and among schoolchildren has long become both sufficiently prevalent and sufficiently dangerous to warrant far greater official attention. A point has long been reached where we – the Ministry of Education, parents and other stakeholders – simply must concede that nowhere near enough is being done to address the problem. For a start there is no evidence that any serious attempt is being made to study the problem and understand its causes, so that in the absence of a clear understanding of why we are confronted with frequent acts of terrible violence, including murder, among schoolchildren, the solutions that we have been seeking to apply are disconnected from the occurrences themselves.
During a conversation with this newspaper a few days ago a senior teacher at a Georgetown Secondary School recently described the phenomenon of violence among schoolchildren as “a new and frightening reality.” She explained that while there was really nothing new about schoolyard skirmishes, per se, those used to be brought to abrupt ends by the intervention of a teacher. What had changed, she said, was the level and intensity of violence and the fact that teacher intervention was no longer a deterrent. In other words, in some schools, violence among schoolchildren was now outside the control of the school authorities.
The teacher made two significant points about violence in schools and among schoolchildren. First, she expressed the view that in many cases there was a strong correlation between violent children and violent living circumstances, including violent parents and other peers who, in some cases, might actually see nothing wrong with their children’s behaviour. “Many violent children bring their dispositions from the influences of their homes, their communities, or both,” she said. She went further, suggesting that there may even be cases in which parents and acquaintances may validate such violent behaviour, a circumstance which meant that those children would be less inclined to recognise and respond to the authority of either the teacher or the school.
Secondly, she made the point that while, in previous years, suppressing violence among schoolchildren was limited largely to breaking up schoolyard fistfights and wrestling matches and summoning parents afterwards, these days, confrontations among schoolchildren frequently involved the use of lethal weapons and that teachers had come to understand that by intervening they might be putting their own safety at risk. The significant difference these days, she said, has been the complete loss of authority on the part of teachers, arising out of a concern that they too could become targets for terrible violence. And while she went to great pains to suggest that we may not as yet have reached the point of mob rule within our school system she was quite prepared to argue that “in some schools there are children, both individuals and groups, who are simply above reproof and conform to school rules only when they are inclined to do so.”
The question that arises is whether, in the absence of any serious study on all of the nuances and ramifications of violence in schools and among schoolchildren, the Ministry of Education might not be functioning in a permanent Ivory Tower, seeking to apply altogether inappropriate solutions. As far as our teacher is concerned the current wave of violence among schoolchildren “is not just another dimension of juvenile indiscipline, it is the most serious crisis facing the school system.”
And if she conceded that she does not have all of the answers our educator argued that any attempt at a solution that neglects to recognise the importance of the contract between the parent and the school is doomed to failure. She argued that it is the parent as much as the child that must be held accountable for violence in schools and among schoolchildren, and that that being the case it is the link between the school and the parent that may well hold the key to tackling the problem. In this regard she made an argument for “a stronger system of parent-teacher associations” and “a compulsory requirement that parents work more closely with schools… I do not believe that we place sufficient emphasis on the importance of the parent in the process,” she said.
This perspective is not dissimilar to one that has previously been articulated by this newspaper as part of a wider approach to tackling violence in schools and among schoolchildren. We have made the point that the Ministry of Education and the officials and teachers who administer the school system needs to work much harder to enforce a ‘binding contract’ between the parent and the school; a contract that, on the one hand, compels the parent to deliver to the school a child who is amenable to following clearly laid-down rules relating to discipline and receptivity to education delivery and, on the other, requires the school to strenuously apply a code of conduct while creating safe and conducive spaces for the delivery of education. Each party must be held accountable for upholding their side of the contract.
The point about such a contract, of course, is that it not only places a far greater burden of responsibility on the shoulders of parents – which is as it should be − to deliver to schools children who are disinclined to violence and prepared to follow laid-down rules but imposes penalties for transgression which penalties should, in particular cases, include the right of the school to be relieved of any obligation to accommodate children who demonstrate an unmistakable proclivity for dangerous levels of aggression.
A first step in the direction of a binding contract that holds parents far more accountable for the behaviour of their children may well be to place increased emphasis on the importance of parent participation in PTAs so that that they can be fully apprised of their responsibilities under the contract with the school. Beyond PTAs, schools – heads of schools and teachers – need to develop additional ways of reaching out to parents, maintaining a sustained two-way flow of communication that serves to further reinforce mutual obligations under the contract on both sides.
All too frequently fora on education that address issues, some of which have to do with children in the school setting, neglect to involve parents in a really meaningful way. The truth is that parents demonstrate varying degrees of interest in the institutions that provide their children with a formal education and perhaps we are all to inclined to forget that, all too frequently, it is those parents who appear the most indifferent to their contract with the school whose attention we most need to attract.
