“Very disturbing” was part of the response proffered by Education Minister Dr Rupert Roopnaraine to the report of a violent confrontation between two secondary school boys on the first day of the new school year. Contextually, we find that to be a profound understatement.
There is a distressing familiarity to this type of occurrence as, indeed, there is a familiarity to the abject and protracted failure of the authorities to mount anything even remotely resembling an effective response to the challenge of violent schoolchildren in what, we are told, are sometimes vendetta-related confrontations that bear an uncanny resemblance to gang-related violence and which so often end in serious injury and in one instance a few years ago, an unfortunate fatality.
We are not now way beyond the point of simply debating what has become a virtual epidemic. Not only do violent children threaten the stability of the school system as a whole, but worse, the system itself appears to have no clear idea as to how to respond to the threat to its stability. Teachers, having themselves been victims of their violent charges, now appear so thoroughly intimidated that they have now firmly embraced the option of self-preservation. The Ministry of Education itself has, over the years, proven to be woefully inadequate in its search for appropriate remedial measures. A point has been reached where the prevailing approach appears to be to simply ‘sit tight’ and hope for the best.
Now that the challenge of taking some measure of remedial action has been placed on the desk of Dr Roopnaraine it is important that he does not repeat the errors of his predecessors, particularly the error of debating the issue to death ‒ talking a great deal but doing little or nothing. If we have no quarrel with Dr Roopnaraine’s advocacy of counselling in schools, it is worth wondering whether the scale of the crisis of violent schoolchildren and violence in schools does not require, in the first instance, far more assertive measures of which counselling might conceivably be just a part.
This newspaper has, on more than one previous occasion, raised what we believe to be the issue of the dispositions and attitudes which some children import from their homes and their communities into the school setting. We have argued that rebellious attitudes, resistance to good order, school bullying and inclinations towards violence do not materialize out of thin air. They are, in all likelihood, nurtured in dysfunctional homes and communities. Accordingly, we have argued the search for solutions will be fruitless unless it is located in the right places, those very dysfunctional homes and communities.
Contemporary patterns of violent crime suggest that we are confronted with what is often the seamless transition from violence in schools to full-fledged, mostly gun-related crime, including clinical executions, all the more reason why addressing violence among schoolchildren has become a national emergency.
The issue of responding to the challenges of dysfunctional children and school-related violence had surfaced under previous ministers of education though we do not recall a great deal of concerted remedial attention being given to the matter. Since the tenure of Sheik Baksh as Minister of Education the Stabroek News has been urging the ministry to stop marking time – which, frankly, is what it has mostly been doing for the longest while – on the matter and begin to treat it earnestly.
We see not even the remotest nexus between violence amongst school-age children and corporal punishment. It is, critically, to parents and homes that we must begin to look for support in bringing about behavioural change in children, since it is the homes, frequently, that are the incubators of deviant behaviour. That is why we have repeatedly restated the view that the Ministry of Education must seek to build strong partnerships with parents, however difficult that challenge may be. Whatever alternative approaches we apply, the support of parents and guardians provides by far the best guarantee that children will be compliant, orderly, disposed to adhering to rules and amenable to education delivery, since it is in the homes and communities that the earliest sets of rules and mores are fashioned.
Among the recommendations that we have made recently is that the much under-used vehicle of the Parent-Teacher Association be employed to better effect in recruiting parents as genuine stakeholders in the education delivery process. We make no apologies for saying that in far too many cases PTA’s are weak and ineffective. Some heads of schools do not appear to regard the creation and effective functioning of the PTA as part of their substantive responsibility. Accordingly, they deny themselves and their schools what is perhaps the best possible opportunity to have law-abiding and compliant school populations.
We have made the argument for the PTA as part of a ‘contract’ between the parent and the school, so that there is a far greater measure of compulsoriness on the parts of both school and parent as far as involvement in the PTA is concerned. As for the contract it must bind parents to delivering into the school system children who are prepared to function in a rules-based environment, whilst for its part the school must undertake education delivery as best it can to those children.
It is for the Ministry of Education (not so much the bureaucrats but the school heads and teachers) on the one hand and the parents on the other to agree on both the details of such a contract as well as the measures to ensure effective enforcement. The quicker Dr Roopnaraine seeks to get parents, teachers and bureaucrats across the country together in serious, open and solutions-oriented discourse the better our chances of tackling the scourge of violence amongst schoolchildren and in schools. Simply put, we believe that the problem is unlikely to go away unless far more is done to afford parents their legitimate stakeholder role in the education process as a whole.
