The Ministry of Education’s run of ‘bad form’ persists The protracted run of ‘bad form’ which our education system has been facing was alarmingly extended last week with the horrendous stabbing of a schoolgirl in Linden, during the course of an out-of-school fight in which the attacker allegedly intervened on behalf of the injured child’s opponent. In preceding weeks, there had been two incidents at schools in Georgetown of in-school altercations, involving teachers and parents, the latter reportedly culminating in an ugly brawl which got the attention of the police and afterwards, the courts. This particular altercation reportedly erupted during a formal meeting held at the school to attempt to settle the substantive incident. Parts of what was a truly disgraceful fracas was available on Facebook. This newspaper has addressed both of the in-school incidents in recent editorials.
It may well be that the Ministry of Education feels put upon by the proverbial holding of its feet to the fire in the wake of these incidents. That is its own fault since in none of the instances referred to so far has it attempted to proffer a clear and authoritative response. It has persisted with its customary line of prevarication, and empty promises. Never once has it provided the public with a full report on the outcomes of the various recent in-school incidents which have ranged from drug use, some of it on school premises to parent-on-teacher violence. Always, its responses have hovered between vagueness and silence. The Ministry’s favourite posture has been to declare a posture of “zero tolerance” of whatever the infraction to which it is alluding. In its repetitive pursuit of that option it appears, these days, to be astoundingly unaware of the fact that few people ever take its contrived militancy seriously. This newspaper recalls no deliberate and sustained action, no throwing down of the proverbial gauntlet by the Ministry in response to the string of assaults on the education system by rogue elements, including both children and parents, over many years. We have pointed out that its posture has led, inevitably, to the public questioning of its dispute settlement image-management capabilities but also its ability to fashion and effectively enforce rules that seek to provide robust pushback against infractions that threaten the very fabric of our school system.
This newspaper has, at least twice over the past two years or so, made arguments in editorials for the formalization of ‘contracts’ between parents and schools that bind the parents on the one hand to providing schools with children who will demonstrate a mindfulness of rules that concern their behaviour both in and out of school. Contextually, we have argued that schools should be afforded the right, where children are overly disruptive, dangerously ill-tempered, bullying and possessed of a proclivity for violence, to exclude them unless and until they become disposed to conforming. It is either that or some schools continue to live permanently on the edge of mayhem.
In the face of what is now manifest evidence of the phenomenon of disruptive, even violent parents we have argued that the Ministry should design simple security-related engagements between schools and parents. In that instance we pointed out that in the case of the St. Agnes’ incident, the holding of a meeting between parents and a teacher in a matter that had the potential to become combustible was ill-advised. Perhaps the decision to go down that road reflects the fact that the parties involved in putting the meeting together, in the first place, were not, perhaps, as informed as they ought to have been in matters pertaining to dispute-settlement.
Here, one might ask whether, these days, the challenges associated with schools’ administration have not given rise to the need for the training of teachers (and most certainly Heads of schools) in an entirely new set of disciplines that have to do with the continually evolving nature of schools’ administration; which raises the question as to whether the Ministry’s customary undertakings to conduct “a thorough investigation” are not, in essence, thinly veiled admissions of its own chronic limitations since we have no recollection of ever having seen the outcome of any of those “thorough investigations.”
Here, one wonders, surely, whether there is not an argument for suggesting that the scope and depth of training for teachers and teaching administrators have simply not kept pace with some of the more recent challenges facing the education system, many of those challenges being almost non-existent up to a decade or two ago.
Some of the Ministry’s challenges clearly derive from circumstances that lie outside of its control. It cannot, for example, do much about the home or community-spawned influences that cause out-of-control children (and parents, for that matter) to threaten the stability of the entire school system. We concede too that the Ministry and schools are seriously challenged in their quest to fend off scourges like in-school drug use and violence among schoolchildren. If, however, we accept the age-old adage that authority is usually attended by a commensurate level of responsibility then there is every reason to comment sternly on what, over time, has been the Ministry of Education’s failure to rise quickly and effectively to many of the challenges that imperil our school system. Our concern, as we have said previously, is that these fault lines grow worse in circumstances where we are presented with sorry little evidence of serious policy-driven initiatives to push back what are, in fact, increasingly potent assaults on our education system. The Ministry of Education must begin to provide that pushback without further prevarication. By that we mean that it must cease its ‘zero tolerance’ noises every time the system is threatened by one menace or another and begin now to properly position itself to provide responses that are serious and go searching diligently for remedial outcomes.
