For a long time and with little success the Ministries of Education and National Security have been working together to tackle school violence. The deficiencies of that arrangement were laid bare just this week when National Security Minister Edmund Dillon admitted he had not been aware of the level of violence in schools until he saw videos of students fighting.
TTUTA president Devanand Sinanan is right. Violence has been a big problem in T&T’s education system for a very long time and it has been escalating because interventions by the Ministry of Education have been mostly reactive and ineffective.
As far back as the 1980s, when former educator Clive Pantin held the portfolio of Education Minister in the then NAR administration, school violence had been deemed to be at crisis levels. In the search for solutions, a National Consultation on Violence and Indiscipline in Schools was convened in 1988. In the tradition of consultations as they tend to take place in this country, there was a lot of talk and volumes of studies and recommendations, but little in terms of action.
Very likely, in some dusty cobweb-filled corner of the ministry’s Alexandra Street headquarters, records of that event still exist—plans and proposals that never saw the light of day. So unsuccessful was that exercise that it was repeated a decade later when the ever increasing violence resulted in the stabbing death of teenager Shaquille Roberts by one of his schoolmates on the compound of the Success Laventille Composite School. That consultation also degenerated into an exercise in futility.
Over the years there have been interventions and adjustments of all kinds. There was a pilot project involving deans and heads of departments where teaching loads were adjusted so that some academic staff took on the pastoral care of students while others focused on the curriculum.
Although it appeared to be unrelated, a 2001 decision by then Education Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to ban corporal punishment also had an effect on school violence and indiscipline. Mrs Persad-Bissessar’s explained that the move, which came with some legislative backing, was in keeping with her belief that the “carrot rather than a stick is more desirable”. Unfortunately, the end of corporal punishment did not result in a more enlightened approach to disciplining students. No time, effort or creativity was ever invested in an alternative policy, so that schools continued to degenerate into the battle zones they have now become with ill disciplined students violently venting their rage and frustration on fellow students and teachers.
For a long time and with little success the Ministries of Education and National Security have been working together to tackle school violence. The deficiencies of that arrangement were laid bare just this week when National Security Minister Edmund Dillon admitted he had not been aware of the level of violence in schools until he saw videos of students fighting. He needs to get up to speed on the problem, because those videos, which have gone viral social media sites, are not highlighting anything new. They have simply made the problem more visible.
The time has come for education stakeholders to stop talking around the issue and come up with sustainable and sensible plans to transform public schools into the safe, healthy institutions of learning they are supposed to be.
There is no need for another national consultation. Just dust off the studies that have already been done, review and update recommendations and implement those most likely to work in T&T’s current social and economic situation. This, along with a system that allows for meaningful, ongoing collaboration between parents, teachers and state agencies, will go a long way in solving the problem.