Playing the fool with school violence

THE EDITOR: I would be grateful if you could publish this letter written to Power radio 102 recently.

Dear Sirs, after listening on Wednesday November 19 to the umpteenth discussion on your show about school violence and possible solutions, including corporal punishment, I feel compelled to write and set the record straight.  Firstly, I am writing as a mental health professional who has worked with children and adolescents from a wide range of social and family background, and as one who is familiar with at least some of the research on young people and violence. So these are not just my own opinions or feelings.

Secondly, Richard Ragoobarsingh was completely right on both points: one, if you want to reduce school violence, you have to take a scientific approach rather than an emotional one; and two, corporal punishment is definitely not part of the solution. Let’s look at the issue of corporal punishment first. To begin with, it never stopped in many schools, at least the primary schools, both private and public. Ask children and they will tell you that yes, the teachers ‘beat’ in their school. So the present outbreak of violence is coming from students who most likely went through primary school exposed to corporal punishment as a means of discipline and oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to have worked terribly well.

The other point is that the worst corporal punishment takes place in primary schools, where the children are not causing these terrible discipline problems and are not engaging in gang wars. It is routine for teachers still to stroll through classes with sticks, rulers or other implements in their hands, for the purpose of dealing out ‘discipline.’ Although the secondary school students are the ones engaging in serious deviant behaviour, corporal punishment in secondary schools is much more carefully controlled. This is because the teachers are dealing with bigger, older and potentially more dangerous students. In other words, corporal punishment is meted out, not when students need to be kept in order, but when the teacher is bigger and the student can’t fight back. Which is how it always is with abuse.

If the Ministry of Education is serious about tackling violence in schools, many tried and tested models already exist. Two years ago, an organisation called the School Leadership Centre held a conference for teachers on bullying and violence in schools. The feature speaker was the head of an organisation which runs a successful violence reduction programme in schools in Jamaica. This year, at another conference held by the School Leadership Centre, the feature speaker was a female principal who has spent her career transforming difficulty, violent ghetto schools in New York City into top class academic institutions. She now heads an organisation which works with schools to help the make the same transformation.

A few years ago, Lifeline held a conference on young males and violence, with international experts presenting the latest information. All the information and expertise we could possibly need has been available to us right here in Trinidad and Tobago. Sadly, the official presence at these events has been limited to an opening or closing speech where it was clear that the powers that be didn’t really know or care just what was going on. And, just to make the point again, in all the tried and proven programmes described to deal with school violence, there wasn’t a single one which advocated beatings for the students. Yet they all worked.

There is no quick fix to the issue of school violence and deviance among young people in general. That is because these difficulties didn’t spring up overnight. In 1991-1992 when I worked briefly with the Central Guidance Unit of the Ministry of Education, it was very clear that the schools were in crisis and had been for some years. No one was listening then and the necessary resources were never provided to deal with the situation. In 2003, twelve years later, the Ministry is still talking about someday providing more Guidance Officers for the schools and it’s clear that nobody has begun to listen yet.  Please don’t imagine that we have even seen the worst that can happen. As long as we continue to play the fool with empty noise and double talk, the children are going to turn up the heat until someone gets the message and begins to deliver what they truly need. More power to them!

KAREN   MOORE
Champs Fleurs