Dear Editor,
So stressed out, that she herself was emoting the violence of depression – reacting to the school environment, from which medically certified leave had become necessary – a situation that somehow made this Headmistress much too empathetic to a distant colleague’s embroilment in the well publicised Houston School incident – exhibiting a cutlass.
Over the years of our growing acquaintance with the declared frustrations of working conditions created by an insensitive Teaching Service Commission; not to mention an authoritarian Ministry on the one hand, and an unhelpful union on the other, the aggressive relationships experienced with: i) students; ii) parents; iii) combination of both, accumulating into the depletion of physical, psychological and spiritual health; albeit on top of the lowest salary structure amongst government professionals anywhere. She fumed: “Nobody enquires about how we cope with our own children, as though they are not incensed by ‘Rights of the Child’ of their counterparts, as advocated across-the-board in social media who, in their presentations, applaud bad habits, if only for adults to transmit to their children, and instinctively to their neighbours and their children.
Despairingly, if not quite irrelevantly, she reflected on her and their parents’ generations being disciplined at school, and becoming none the worse for it. This perhaps is now seen as the ‘left’ side of a relationship that emphasises ‘Rights of the Child’ in schools, and at Parents Teachers Association meetings, ‘rights’ cannot be corrected, having simply supplanted the concept of ‘behaviour’ and ‘misbehaviour’, albeit in an environment that now reeks of political values and persuasions, if not pervasiveness. The distressed, indeed disagreeable professionally stomped on her ‘left’ side – about the ‘talking down’, never ‘talking with’, and ‘listened to’ in an overriding vertical relationship. So that after examination results the discussion and cheers go ‘rightfully’ to the successes (students) while the contributors to success are ‘left’ aside, without ‘rights’ to any reward – no pay increases!
But all this is also being experienced in the larger social and work environments, in which the leaderships are hardly the ‘right’ exemplars of disciplined behaviour, as in our defective Parliament; inactive Public Accounts Committee, deformed Judiciary; the suspect Oil and Energy dialogue; insistence on the singular ‘Right’ to manage a One (sided) Guyana. The foregoing complainant could not have been the product of teachers whose ‘rights’ to an equal playing field are acknowledged, and to being allowed to land an ‘uppercut’. Just have more interactive sports in schools, including ‘Boxing’. Some teachers and students may well be in the same weight category. Do the ‘Rights of the Child’ include aspiring to be a teacher?
Sincerely,
E. B. John
