We wait in a condition of frustrating powerlessness for a definitive medical determination as to whether sixteen year-old Golden Grove Secondary School student, Jamal Reid, the victim of last Thursday’s gruesome school yard attack with a cricket bat, will survive his injuries, recover fully, go on to sit his CXC’s and afterwards, get on with the remainder of what, hopefully, will be a productive life.
What happened last Thursday in the course of what the Stabroek News (Saturday November 11) described as a “school yard attack” makes the point, emphatically, that in-school violence has now ‘graduated’ from the rumbustious school yard fracas that delivered more raucousness than serious injury and which used to be immediately dispersed on the intervention of a teacher.
Not so these days. What currently obtains, are uproarious, frequently, weaponized brawls, the combatants, bent on inflicting physical hurt, boisterously egged on by groups of partisan backers. Here, pacifiers, whether these be other children disapproving of the encounters, or teachers, intervene at their own considerable physical risk.
To place blame for this worsening ugliness at any one door would be to misrepresent the nature of the phenomenon. Violence in schools is, unquestionably, a microcosm of a wider problem. It is driven, in large measure, by ‘learnt behaviour,’ a graduation from what used to be scuffles where the ensuing physical damage was limited to bumps and bruises and sometimes torn clothing that, for the most part, remained repairable, to, these days, injuries that warrant hospitalization.
In-school altercations, these days, are often outgrowths of patterns of violence learnt in the homes and communities where the combatants are born, grow up and learn to mimic the lifestyles of ‘road’ heroes, who, frequently, include close relatives and friends. All too often they strategically import the reputations of their ‘connections’ into the schools they attend as a means of acquiring ‘reputations’ of their own.
But that is not the whole of the problem. Whether or not, in our particular circumstances, the authorities have, over time, sought to sufficiently understand the problem of in-school violence and do enough, in collaboration with homes and communities to find remedies, is decidedly questionable. Here, those responsible for addressing the problem, not least the Ministry of Education, all too frequently appear out of their depth in terms of mounting effective responses. The reason? They are possessed of an ‘institutional’ understanding of the problem, in which circumstance the applied ‘corrective measures’ are at variance with the real nature of the problem.
There is, for example, little evidence, that the ‘education system,’ meaning, for the most part, the decision-makers inside the Ministry of Education, itself, has done sufficient incisive collaborative work with parents, teachers and communities as a whole, to appreciate (for example) the importance of behaviour-related criteria as one of the conditions for the enrollment/attendance at school.
Where Heads of Schools and Teachers (who are the front line ‘actors’ in the drama) have little or no say in applying dispositional and conduct-related considerations as part of schools’ admission criteria, they are, from ‘day one,’ batting on what one might call ‘bad wickets.’ Put differently, there is a considerable school of thought that obtains within the school system itself that contends that the uneven balance of power between what is seen as the Ministry’s muscle-bound bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the less cumbersome more pragmatic approach by Heads of schools and teachers to the day to day running of schools is part of the problem.
Where, as is the case in many instances, children arrive at school doors for the first time, altogether untutored in the protocols relating to individual and group behaviour in that setting, and where they quickly become mindful of the limited boundaries of teacher authority, they often seek to impose their own ‘takeover’ edicts. These include the ‘legitimization’ of disruptive mores that sweep aside (or at the very least, miniaturize) the customary behavioural restraint mechanisms that have long been embedded the school system.
Here, it has to be said that there may well be a considerable degree of ‘validity’ to the view that some of our schools are ‘run,’ considerably, by student enforcers and their outside-of-school ‘connections’ who wield considerably more ‘authority’ than the teachers themselves.
In the instance of the attack on Jamal Reid, It matters, one feels, that the probe address, among other things, issues of disposition and mindset and whether or not such issues ought not to be matters of particular importance at the admission level and throughout the school lives of children. Here, it seems, there is choice between vigorously ‘pushing back’ against the various forms of usurpation of ‘authority’ by school bullies and having our schools descend into a condition of irretrievable perdition.
What can hardly be denied (and it ought not to have taken the Jamal Reid incident for the Ministry of Education to recognize this) is that the tools that are currently at the disposal of Heads of Schools and teachers with which to combat violence in schools are manifestly too fragile to match the scale of the problem. The reality here, is that we are dealing with what, in some instances, are ‘students’ whose dispositions are buttressed by external supporting elements. These, it appears, have, in many instances, ‘rolled over’ the existing in-school administrators (Heads of Schools and teachers) who are, in many instances, considerably intimidated by the challenge that confronts them.
Occurrences like the horrendous Jamal Reid school yard attack (and last Friday’s St. John’s College ‘brawl’ that resulted in injuries to ‘a teenager’ that warranted hospitalization) are painfully repetitive manifestations of the failure of our education system to seriously and effectively ‘team up’ with communities, parents and law enforcement to fashion enforceable mechanisms that can serve as effective pushback against this scourge. If blame for the persistence of the problem cannot all be placed at a single door, whether or not the state, primarily through the education system, is doing sufficient to remove (or at least significantly reduce) the blight of violence from our school system is manifestly questionable.
More to the point the Ministry of Education remains disinclined to concede that violence (or the ever present threat of violence) in schools has become one of the more serious challenges to the fabric our education system. It is as if it believes that if the problem is left alone for an unspecified period of time, it will go away. Occurrences like the vicious and possibly life-threatening attack on Golden Grove Secondary School student Jamal Reid and the St. John’s College brawl, both of which occurred on the same day point unerringly to the fact that when it comes to effectively tackling the problem of in-school violence the Ministry and its functionaries continue to fail to get their collective mind around measures for effectively tackling the problem.
