Martin HenryIT'S A jungle in there. The fear is palpable. Students are afraid. Teachers are afraid. And even the police must now approach with caution. Administrators are hamstrung and powerless.
An oral sex riot at Jonathan Grant High School, Spanish Town, St. Catherine, led to the closure of that institution for two days last week. The media story is that two students were caught performing oral sex in a bathroom. The disciplinary intervention of the school administration led to an uproar on the campus. When the police were summoned, they were stoned. The principal is "tight-lipped."
A few weeks ago, a grieving family had to bury their bright, ambitious, peace-keeping daughter who was stabbed to death at school while trying to pacify a fight. Whole armouries of weapons are seized in some institutions and there have been arrests of students for guns and ammunition. The police could profitably open a special statistical category for school-related crimes including an increasing number of murder cases.
A frightened teacher has written to the Rev. Hyatt's advice column: "I am very concerned about the rise in the crime and violence... I find it very frightening as a teacher, as I am often fearful for my life. Gone are the days when you could scold or discipline a student. These days it is either the student or the parent who will be coming to you to exact punishment."
There is ganja at Munro - and everywhere else. There is booze (as The Sunday Gleaner has recently documented), and there is every other kind of drug readily available. Not only is there widespread use but students are peddlers on campus.
Donmanship gone a school. There is growing terrorist extortion in schools. Other students are being forced by the student dons to pay taxes for right of passage and presence or the victims dare not turn up at school. Like in the protection rackets on the streets, fear of reprisal shelters the extortion from exposure. There are quiet transfers of students to avoid the taxes and for their safety. Other children are displaying stress-related illnesses brought on by the battlefield conditions of school.
Students are being robbed by others on campus, and there have been more than a few passing incidents of gang rapes. But fear rules, and mouths are padlocked. A report of a hold-up robbery to the vice principal of a prominent city school brought only the recounting, in despair, of similar cases. There was also the sentiment below the surface that the victims should be more careful as there is little the school can do to prevent or to punish.
School indiscipline is a growing international problem. In a recent Gleaner Letter-of-the-Day, Winnie Anderson-Brown advises us that "teachers and students have been attacked on school compounds all over the world and the reality of our times is that it will continue." So, "we need to prepare ourselves to deal with the barbarity of these modern times, the savagery of this new age where if you 'dis' make sure you are prepared to be missed from the face of the earth. This is the lesson our children learn." Mrs. Anderson-Brown is advocating "it is time for violence-prevention officers to be trained and placed in our schools" as in New York where schools are already high-security prisons.
Indiscipline, crime and violence in American schools, with their recurring mass shootings, are already regularly big international news. In quiet Britain, the government has issued strict guidelines to crack down on violent and bullying pupils. Penalties include immediate expulsion for those found carrying weapons and treatment in special youth education units. Schools are not to reinstate students who have been expelled for violence or bullying. "Indiscipline is a significant cause of a very large number of teachers leaving the profession within a short time of starting their careers", says the general-secretary of the National Union of Teachers in endorsing the new guidelines. Jamaican teachers, nonetheless, are finding greener pastures in Britain; and it is not just the money.
The new Patrick Manning government in Trinidad and Tobago is putting up TT$24 million to combat violence and indiscipline in schools. Nice choice of words, "to combat". According to Education Minister, Hazel Manning, the Prime Minister's wife, discussions with the perpetrators of indiscipline and violence reveal an anger and perplexity that appear to be "a cry for help." There was no report on what discussions with victims revealed if any were held.
Even without having to contend with violent indiscipline in barbarous times, Mrs. Anderson-Brown is quite correct that the "all-purpose" teacher is not a functional entity. The all-purpose school makes no sense either. Famous management theorist Peter Drucker tells us that organisations lose their way when they lose their focus. The business of school is education. The police and security functions are destroying the education function.
IDEOLOGICAL REASONS
Schools are facing a crisis of purpose and performance. There is nothing like a crisis to clarify thinking about goals and the means of achieving them. As violence, indiscipline, and the chaos which springs from them, descend upon the system, we will exhaust patchwork solutions and be forced to rethink fundamentals.
It seems quite obvious, for instance, that if the business of school is education, then no student belongs there whose business is not also education. Governments, for ideological reasons, force schools to be holding pens, police and security agencies, psychiatric wards, and substitutes for delinquent parents.
I have often wondered how Burchell Whiteman, the accomplished educator, and Burchell Whiteman, the politician, reconcile policy directives which strengthen the hands of thugs in schools while weakening the process of education. But this huge dilemma is not personal; it is a creature of the international ideology of automatic universal access to state schooling, whatever the condition and come what may. It cannot be the business of schools to worry about what happens to hooligans with no interest in education and who are a threat to others if they are removed from school. They may, perhaps, need care and keeping by a paternalistic state, but then some other kind of agency is required. Their care and keep is an intolerable burden on the school designed for education of the willing and the reasonably disciplined. Even if a "right to education" is argued, every right is limited when it infringes upon the rights of others.
Today, this advocacy for the radical refocusing of the school on its primary function is heresy. Tomorrow, as the tragedy of rising indiscipline in the all-purpose school takes its toll, such a view will be gospel. It is true that school reflects society, but school was intended to transform, not merely reflect, society.
Martin Henry is a communications specialist.
