Amina Blackwood MeeksONE UNFORGETTABLE image in the little saga at Denham Town Primary School last week was of the female police officer politely replying "No, Sir" to a question posed by the television news reporter who interviewed her about the incident. The reporter seemed young enough to be her son.
Her polish echoed beyond police training, back to a time when respect characterised the relationship between human beings. They were both searching for answers for the wanton lawlessness of boys and girls young enough to be her grandchildren. This search went back to a notion of being taught to think before acting, to an idea that the value of education is that we are taught to think, to a belief that drastic actions should be seen as last resorts.
These little ones, of course, probably felt that they had as much justification as Stephen, the 12-year-old shepherd boy of France who, in 1212, declared that God had told him that only innocent children could drive the infidels from the Holy Land.
At about the same time as this carnival of the absurd in Denham Town, the boys of Old Harbour High School were to be observing the first all-boys day at the school. They joined the list of a number of other schools that recently have sought to hold such days in response to what the society fears that our boys had become or were in danger of becoming.
By some assessment the behaviour of our boys had become marked by indiscipline, lewdness and coarseness, disregard for authority, inappropriate ways of relating to women, less than acceptable academic performance, emotional and psychological deficiencies, all symptoms of marginalised individuals. One of the concerns about these all-boys days is that the efforts to rescue our boys ignore the fact that our girls are also marginalised. The little crusade at Denham Town Primary should give us pause for thought.
We are not just dealing with marginalised boys but with marginalised children. That is, if we allow ourselves to think for a moment outside of strict economic terms. For, let's face it, much of the arguments about boys being marginalised have centred on their economic possibilities, a bemoaning of the fact that so long as girls continue to out-perform boys academically, they will end up getting better jobs and how disastrous this will be for the ego of these males who have learned that individuals are valued by the size of their pay-cheques and somehow it has been ordained that men should earn more than women. Some other time for that gender analysis. Except to say now that kind of socialisation is itself responsible for the further anti-social ways to which our men resort to redeem themselves from the margin.
There is a far more dangerous kind of marginalisation in our midst: the drift away from the core values represented by that very well-mannered female officer at Denham Town Police Station. This removal from what is truly important is characterised by the uncaring language in which we speak about and to one another. The more disrespectful and uncaring the language the higher the ratings of the user. And in many ways it is encouraged. Check the language in which the so-called worst dressed is described by people who have nothing better to do than to equate someone's being with the clothes they wear, for example.
The unpopular people in this country are increasingly those who do not feel or see the need to shout to be heard, "dem soff". Caring language is unbecoming, people who ask questions before they take a position are unbecoming, people who search for truth are unbecoming. If our children appear to us to be unbecoming it is that they have become what the society needs to unbecome.
The all-boys day at Old Harbour High School happened very quietly and was also perhaps drowned out by the noise at Denham Town. It is what we have brought into the 21st century, a penchant for celebrating the crass and relegating the really good stuff to the also-ran. The crass knows how to get our attention, the good is in need of marketing.
The behaviour is not confined to the social and economic circumstances of our Denham Towns. There is evidence of the behaviour of marginalised people across the board in our schools. The youth of the inner-city manifest as flinging rackstone. Uptown, Ministers of Religion have had to be called in to counsel entire student populations over the spreading of malicious rumours, uncaring words.
There are daily lamentations about what has become of such and such a school. Frequently, there is dismay that the children of the inner city are now in the inner sanctum of the outer-city. What is often missed is that inner-city and outer-city children find common ground in the dramatic failure of the adults in whose care they are entrusted to provide the leadership and guidance that they need to be rooted in core values. With whom did the children consult before they took up the cudgel, for example?
We look at our children and we see the future, as in the attempts to recover our boys at Old Harbour High School. Or we see what the students at Denham Town Primary School really represent: the innocent children showing us that infidelity to core values needs to be driven from this Holy Land. We need to ask: Are our children being raised in a way that makes us comfortable for them to be out of our presence?
In the end nearly 30,000 people joined Stephen's crusade. Ragged, footsore and half-starving, many of them were manipulated by unscrupulous merchants who loaded them into old rotted ships for "free transport to the Holy land." Many drowned as two of the ships sank. The rest were eventually sold into slavery.
The students of Old Harbour High School and Denham Town Primary represent two views of the future. Which one will it be?
Amina Blackwood Meeks is a communications specialist.
