School violence…again

Yet, the plague continues and seems to be growing worse. Everyone has an offering to make and again, if one listens to the conversations on the ground we can take each reason offered by the common man and easily create a summary of all the factors accounting for school violence.

One gets the impression that the Minister of Education is surrounded by advisers who sit in little rooms without windows or social media or anything of the sort that allows them to connect with the world. Nothing is wrong with such a group of people if they were, let’s say fiction writers, whose career can be based on living in their heads. They are free to have imaginary little friends speaking to them. We are entertained by it and we are all the better for it, for we do need to escape this crazy world from time to time.

But when it comes to matters of state and furthermore children’s education, one would like to assume that the office responsible for the proper governing of the system has capable personnel.

But alas! Again we are in a fix.

This Tuesday’s Express newspaper carried some very entertaining answers to the question of whether people agreed with the Minister of Education that school violence had lessened. To sum it up, the answers amounted to “the man must be dreaming”.

Well I won’t say that it’s too farfetched given many of my friends’ experiences at high schools and my own experience in the service (Thankfully I resigned before the upsurge in violence).

Some school supervisors and retired teachers noted that “the man must be approaching senility” when he commented a few weeks ago that he hardly thinks that an 11-year-old can terrorize any teacher (this, in relation to the issue of the 11-year-old allegedly terrorizing teachers as well as making inappropriate sexual comments towards female students. This led to parents staging a protest calling for the child’s removal from the school).

Life moves in cycles and so we are at this point again where one of our national topics of discussion is school violence. I can’t imagine it becoming any better.

And it is a fatal flaw when we keep pigeon-holing a problem as if we are unable to think on a broader spectrum.

It’s the parents’ fault. It’s the absentee teacher. It’s the breakdown in family values. It’s the abolition of corporal punishment. It’s cable TV. Why is it that nobody says it’s the lack of poor leadership in the country? Why not the loss of jobs and the high cost of living? Why not the lack of security that has citizens on edge and anxious (I’m just providing you with some alternative reasons so you can talk more and appear intelligent to others).

As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” I leave this for you to ponder upon but just as a starter, what does that sentence really mean? Let’s assume for example, that it’s the parents’ fault. But why? What’s the difference between the parent of today versus the parent of yesterday? What are the factors affecting good parenting today? What are some of the challenges that people face as parents? What does the family structure look like today versus in our parents’ time? What does the social structure look like within which parents live and work? These are just some questions I would assume we ask when we decide that it’s the parents’ fault.

Because from the stories we hear of schools in my parents’ time for instance, it seemed to be a societal affair. You didn’t show up for school, a police officer sees you at home and you are questioned as to why you were not in school. Or a teacher comes over to your home to find out why you were absent.

But now it’s the parent’s fault and we fail to realize that parents don’t exist in a vacuum. They also fill other roles - like office worker, two-hour long journey-to work commuter, single parent trying to work two jobs to make ends meet.

But it’s the parents fault because you look at it through the lens of 1980 versus 2017.

For every reason proffered, there are a host of factors impacting on it. School violence is not a one-reason affair. It’s a web of factors including undisciplined leaders and lack of national security.

Adults talk and children are very good listeners. So, from Prime Minister to rum drinker, we should a l l c h e c k o u r - s e l v e s first before we w r e c k some of the potent i a l we have here.