REMOVE VIOLENT STUDENTS FROM THOSE ANXIOUS TO LEARN

"Our youth now loves luxury. It has bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food and tyrannise their teachers." — Socrates, commenting in 329 BC.

The Ministry of Education should consider seriously the question of establishing special schools for violent students and separating them from those anxious to learn.

Globalisation, wearing the mantle of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and aggravated further by the around-the-corner Free Trade Area of the Americas, means that Trinidad and Tobago can no longer continue with a century old "laissez faire" attitude to disruptive students holding back those wishing to learn and advance themselves. Minister of Education, Hazel Manning, is right. There is a need to be firm.

This does not mean a banishing of these students from the educational process, for this will be a negative approach that in the end will not only provoke increases in crime, but will deny the country the right to whatever contribution, however limited, these youngsters may be able to make. They have acted as a needless brake on the progress of other students and at the same time, however unintentionally, on the country's progress.

Meanwhile, whatever schools are set up for them must not only have dedicated teachers but more counsellors than the average schools. In addition, critical to all of this must be the establishment and development of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTA) in these schools and the encouragement of the belief in parents that their children have a chance both at reform and upward mobility.

The PTA, even moreso with respect to these clearly special schools, must be the effective link between home and school. In other words, they must provide the trigger for an optimum cooperative effort between the two. Both elements — parents and teachers — must see themselves as working for the advancement of the children and in the long term, the community.

I wish to make clear that all of this does not mean that disruptive and/or violent schoolchildren should not be effectively punished whether by way of the courts or otherwise. My argument is that save in particularly exceptional circumstances these children should be given a second chance at education, but in specially established schools. Indeed, even the child who may have been required to serve a period of detention should, nonetheless, receive another chance at mobility.

In turn, special tests should be conducted to determine the causes of the violent or disruptive behaviour. It may be that the delinquent children may be reacting to being slow learners or otherwise mentally handicapped, boredom, poverty and deprivation, whether this deprivation is emotional through coming from broken homes, the absence of a father figure or being "barrel children."

I have used the quotation from Socrates, the Greek philosopher who died in 399 BC, to introduce this column, to demonstrate that while we tend to believe that this generation invented delinquency it existed in almost like manner more than 2,300 years ago. There are fundamental differences, however. While the Greek children tended to be of upper income backgrounds and their families may have had slaves, we in Trinidad and Tobago were colonials up to less than 43 years ago.

The difference in the general use of advanced technology is there. In addition, while the Greece of Socrates ruled, intellectually, and as an imperial nation, and would have exported slave produced goods and services which would have encountered minimal competition, globalisation has changed all of that. We need all the available skills possible, and our schoolchildren cannot afford to "skylark."

Goods produced in China, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, India and South Korea, among others, through the use both of technology and cheap labour are steadily penetrating Trinidad and Tobago along with our regional markets. When the rules and regulations of the WTO are in full effect and all of the tariff barriers are down, all we will have, except we can harness the energies of our young people, will be crude and natural gas.

But while, understandably, these are money earners, they are, nonetheless, not employment generators. What will happen is that Trinidad and Tobago's small manufactures will be shut out of foreign and even regional markets and displaced, gradually, even in its own. The country's social services cost will mount in direct ratio to the fall off in jobs in the private sector.

Equally troubling will be that while in the middle to late 20th century, and to some extent now, the country was able to "export" trained people to the United States, whose remittances kept many a family going, financially, the upsurge in Mexicans crossing the US border and the tightening of immigration laws by the United States will narrow such "exports" to a virtual trickle.

I repeat an earlier point. There is a growing need for young Trinidadians and Tobagonians to be equipped to assist the country in ensuring that its goods and services are increasingly competitive not only in the regional and international market place, but even in its own backyard. We have to deal with the reality imposed on us by globalisation, and unless our young people develop the level of expertise and skills to deal with today's advances in technology our small manufacturing industries will be priced out of even its own domestic market. We cannot and must not believe that we can take refuge in the words of Socrates. We must act now and decisively with respect to disruptive schoolchildren or the seeds of their negative behaviour will be reaped in bitter harvest in the globalisation affected years ahead.