…school discipline
With the teachers strike settled (?) our little darlings will soon return to school – and out of our hair!! Our Minister of Education should huddle with “stakeholders” in a parley designed to improve the “deliverables”, with the largest chunk of spending on services in the budget – $100 billion! – This year, representatives of the kids and their parents should be invited to the discussions; they’re certainly “stakeholders”!! Your Eyewitness will repeat – he thinks that Minister Manickchand’s suggestion that teachers’ remuneration be tied to performance must be implemented pronto!!
And by “performance” the only metric he thinks suitable is passes at the NGSA for primary schools and CSECs and CAPEs in high schools. He doesn’t think much of the Coalition’s focus on extracurricular activities – sports, phys. ed and music – and “discipline” to be imposed by the Welfare Dept!! And here it was he thought our challenge was “Math and English”!! Passing over the extracurricular activities for now – the new Min of Culture thinks boxing should be introduced! – your Eyewitness must confess he experiences a definite frisson – if not anger! – whenever he sees the word “discipline” and “children” in the same sentence.
You see, dear reader, he’s a product of the fag end of the “spare the rod and spare the child” philosophy in pedagogy. And he can assure you that the rod – the “wild cane, in his instance – was scarcely spared! The incumbent Education Minister appears to be far from your Eyewitness’s generation, which came through the education system when it wasn’t too far removed from the penal system!! Both were intended to literally whip the inmates (and school children were also inmates!) into (an obedient) state! No “education as socialisation” namby-pamby back then!!
So, is discipline gonna be on the agenda of the stakeholders? Hopefully, it won’t be the US experience of their permissive seventies – when they encouraged their little darlings to “be themselves”. And discovered them to actually be little devils!! Metal detectors for knives and dogs for drugs became standard school paraphernalia. So, they’re now gravitating to the “zero tolerance” approach: strict rules of behaviour are made very clear. After three strikes, the miscreant kid’s out like Flash! But the Minister doesn’t have to go all the way to the States to seen Zero Tolerance in operation. He should just mosey over to the Swami’s school over on West Coast – the one’s that’s giving Queen’s College a run for its money!!
But the stakeholders should know the key to “Zero Tolerance” on discipline is that the kids must gotta be guaranteed success at their exams. This way, most parents line up to enroll their little darlings and ensure they stick to the straight and narrow.
So, we’re back to the teachers, no?
…recycling values
Most folks today wouldn’t remember, but there was a time when all Guyanese “recycled”: not just their soda (“sweet drinks”?) bottles, but also rum bottles – which at that time outnumbered the former! The recycling drive didn’t come from any government pushing “environmentalism”, but from the mundane fact it was cheaper for the “beverage industry” to pay folks to return the glass bottles than buying new ones!
With the advent of plastic bottles, these cost so little that, it ain’t worth the while for manufacturers to purchase empties. And this practice resulted in the non-biodegradable plastic bottles polluting the environment as it presently does – including clogging canals! But in the US, they’ve solved the problem by mandating a 5 cents’ consumer deposit on beverage bottles – redeemable when the bottle is returned!
With the slogan “Don’t trash ‘em – cash ‘em!” their environmental problems solved. There the purchasers have to place the plastic bottles in “recycle bags”!! And those dumped in garbage bins in the streets are collected by scavengers – for the return of 5 cents!!!!
…road nous
Last night your Eyewitness encountered a policeman directing traffic at a roundabout!! Doesn’t this destroy the whole point? Your Eyewitness believes ALL drivers ought to have a one-week refresher course on roundabout protocols!!
