Senseless Educators

First, it was the collaborative effort with the Ministry of National Security to remove and expel “deviant” students in droves, whilst turning Chaguanas North Secondary School into a “hot spot” with constant police patrols; then when delinquent parents kept their children home en masse on Ash Wednesday, the suggested solution has been to legalise truancy for the entire week of Carnival; and now the National Primary Schools Principals’ Association has come up with the absurd idea of reducing lunch by 30 minutes to decrease indiscipline.

The Minister of Education - whose appointment is just as questionable as the Minister of Communication for the same reasons – touts his experience as a former principal of Fatima College and a former president of the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers’ Association as the main reasons why he is best suited for his current position.

Admittedly, it is a step up from having a gynaecologist at the helm, but if you’ve been following our politics, you would realise that experience from yesteryear is useless without au courant knowledge in the field when it comes to successfully running a ministry.

Nevertheless, it is what it is, and we have to live with the nonsense emanating from the people who have the important role of educating our nation’s children.

Regarding the violence and alleged plots of murder at a couple schools formerly known as junior and senior secs in early 2016, the plan was to remove and reform the students involved. However, the farce of sending badly behaved secondary school children for counselling is obvious to me; there is absolutely no way that teenagers already on the wrong track and living in the heart of rough neighbourhoods will attend a few interventionist classes and suddenly become teacher’s pets when that is the environment they return to every day.

On the second issue, earlier this year, soon after the poor attendance on Ash Wednesday was publicly realised, the minister revealed that 81 per cent of secondary school students and 74 per cent of primary school students stayed away from classes, whilst most teachers showed up for work with 81.3 per cent of teachers in secondary school in primary schools and 77.7 percent in secondary school attending classes.

So instead of enforcing sections 78 and 83 of the Education Act 1996, as amended, educators are proposing to keep all students home for absolutely no reason. By comparison, in most cases where there are several inches of snow on the ground on the US east coast, there is no school closure and there is no excuse for being absent.

Not only does this new plan from our locals send the wrong message to students, it places an onerous burden on working parents who unfailingly send their children to school, to now make alternative arrangements at an unnecessary cost to them. And if parents cannot afford to make accommodation for their children, they will then be left unsupervised.

Once again, the government is willing to accept the wrong thing simply because it is much easier than doing what’s right.

The last new bright idea from educators comes from the belief that reducing breaks for primary school students will have a direct and positive impact on indiscipline.

I scoured the internet to find the research on which these educators have relied, but there is nothing substantiating the ipse dixit, despite Minister Garcia finding “merit” in this nonsensical suggestion.

In fact, according to a 2015 study from the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health published online in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, shorter lunch and break periods lead to poor nutrition and consequently, poor health.

And additionally, these playful primary school students can barely remain attentive for an entire class as is; imagine them with less time to play outside of class.

Great idea, folks! It is expected that these people who claim to be educators would know what they’re talking about before saying it out loud in public, but by now the citizenry knows better than to believe anything these people with important-sounding job titles say.

To think that anyone could find a relationship between longer lunch and indiscipline is, frankly, laughable.

Dealing with indiscipline in schools is no easy task because it is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has different causes and resultantly, is expressed differently by each student.

Regardless, violence and indiscipline in schools cannot be dealt with by using these crazy ideas; there is so much research information out there on how to, but it seems that while these educators are attempt ing to teach our children to read, they aren’t doing it themselves.

jamille85@ msn.com