Deteriorating situation with indiscipline in schools

Education Minister Priya Manickchand has said that there are some considerations for reviewing Guyana’s Juvenile Offenders Act, as the Ministry battles the issue of providing an education while addressing the hike of violence in schools.
To quote the Ministry: “We have decided that, in walking the fine line of trying to educate each child, we can’t let any single child disrupt an entire school or harm other children, hurt or bully them. A full investigation or inquiry is usually taken, and we may have to suspend and expel in those circumstances. We’re trying very hard to make sure that we have sessions with all the students…and the country will have to have a relook at our Juvenile Offenders Bill.”
Adults in families are often to be blamed for the moral turpitude of the children under their care, and if inculcating false values into children is an instance of abuse, then many adults are guilty of both abuse and the misdemeanours that the children under their care commit. For instance, some children are encouraged by the adults in their lives to covet and steal the possessions of others.
We will take the privilege of quoting some passages from an enlightening chronicle of times past, documented in an autobiography entitled “A Goodly Heritage” written by Elma Seymour, wife of AJ Seymour, renowned Guyanese writer.
(In the absence of their mother, who was visiting her elder daughter in the USA), Mrs Seymour related of their caregiver, “Aunt Car was truly a second mother to us, and Papa left many of our problems in her hands. She was always helpful and kind. Besides, we all had to be very polite, well-mannered, and obedient; and no loose-talking or (loose) jesting was allowed in our home.
“Aunt Car was always one for encouraging the members of the family, especially those who were married and had started to raise a family, to establish the ‘Family Altar’, where prayers and Bible reading were said daily every morning.”
On the discipline and administration in the educational system, Mrs Seymour recorded, “The primary school system in those days was administered by a governing body for primary schools, and priests and ministers of the various denominational schools were appointed to monitor the administration of the schools. For example, at Carmel R.C., while I was there, Fr McCaffrey was the priest who visited the school once or twice per month, to sign the payroll and the attendance register of teachers; look into any problem facing the head teacher; and sign in the logbook the date of his visit and any remarks he might have to make concerning the discipline of pupils or staff.”
This was during the first PPP Government, when CV Nunes was the Minister of Education.
There were also schools run by Hindu and Islamic organisations, with similar codes of conduct.
The products of this system were decent, well-behaved law-abiding adults who believed in the basic principles of honour, respect for their fellow humans, and compassion for the less fortunate in society.
The system involved training in decorum, deportment, and good manners, with the requisite and necessary inputs to achieving equitable intellectual, social and physical development, which started from the home, and which was strategically supported by a strong network involving the educational system and the community.
Any objective observer can easily argue how far down the ladder we have descended in social behaviour from the days when Mrs Elma Seymour taught school. Rather than a practice where families “pray together” in order to “stay together”, they instead drink together and fight together, and the only solution to this rapid decay in the moral fabric of society is that a holistic approach be taken, as in the days of yore, wherein there is total involvement of societal sectors to upgrade and enhance social behavioural norms.
The Government needs to take a pro-active approach in dealing with juvenile delinquency in a more structured way, where children with severe discipline problems should obtain their education under more strict conditions.
We agree with Minister Manickchand that the only option available, which is to expel undisciplined students, is not a constructive solution.
At the same time, teachers are constrained from punishing children because of widespread concerns about abuse.
According to Seymour, discipline has to be left completely to the parents, as teachers are allowed no latitude, despite the most provoking behaviour from troublemaking students, who even walk with weapons and threaten other students over trifling incidents.
Parents, on the other hand, can withhold privileges within the home environment, but without a simultaneous programme, wherein the school is allowed some leeway, even with monitoring from officials from the Education Department, the problems of society will continue to deteriorate into an escalation of violent and aberrant behaviour, which even authority figures will be helpless to contain.