TACKLING VIOLENCE

Ministry of Education workshops designed to train teachers on how to improve classroom management as part of the Ministry’s ongoing effort at reducing violence and indiscipline in schools will, hopefully, in the long term reduce these vexing problems in the wider society. There is too much violence and indiscipline in the country today, with Newsday headlines attesting to this. But the problems, as the Education Ministry recognises, have their origins in childhood and if detected and properly handled, for example, in the classroom by specially trained teachers may help avert later antisocial explosions.

This does not mean that the responsibility for tackling incipient social ills rests wholly or largely with the schools and with the teachers. Indeed, parents have a critical role to play, and in the well ordered home, the dominant role. A teacher, however, who has received special training in classroom management and in identifying and dealing with problem children is favourably positioned to treat with awkward classroom situations. These are situations, which if not tactfully and effectively handled can impact negatively on the community.

Where the parent fails because he/she may be wholly indifferent or refuses to accept responsibility for raising his/her children properly, the teacher who is exposed to workshops, not only in classroom management, but in remedial education as well, can make a difference. This includes being in a position to determine that some of the pupils, who are backward in class are not necessarily so because they are slow learners, but because of the environment in which they live. All too often, in the past, there have been teachers who have tended to openly categorise children, who because they were backward in class as “duncey.” And, depending on the lack of tact of the teachers, this has tended to result in classroom ridicule of the children.

The children, feeling a sense of rejection, mistakenly see bullying or the use of violence as a means of redressing the imbalance and “proving” their “superiority.” This can be taken a step further to being violent to their peers “on the block” to give them a sense of leadership in the neighbourhood. Very often the violence of adults has its genesis in violent behaviour in school and in their environment as young children and/or teens. An added ingredient has been a lack of anger management. The workshops, “Train the Trainer,” which were coordinated by Dr Michael Alleyne, a former Director of Educational Planning of the Ministry of Education, and held in different areas of the country, were aimed at preventing delinquent and disruptive students from “taking over the classroom from the teacher.” Although harshly put, it clearly was aimed as well at positioning the teachers to make productive citizens of even their most delinquent and disruptive students.