- FileMunro College - a school on a hill, now a school in public spotlight over its discipline methods.
Barry Chevannes, Contributor
OF ALL the life stages, adolescence has proved to be by far the most difficult and problematic.
This is so because the adolescent is both an adult and a child at the same time.
As an adult, the adolescent experiences all the changes that signal physiological maturity, the most consequential being the arousing of the adolescent's reproductive potential.
The adolescent begins to experience all the feelings and sense of personal physical power that an adult experiences.
Indeed, in certain physical performances, he or she may be able to do as well as or better than an adult. We live in an era in which adolescents regularly achieve international ranking in some sports.
But the adolescent is still not an adult, but a child. He or she is a child because we say so.
We, that is society, classify adolescents as socially immature, not yet ready to assume the full responsibilities and independence of adulthood.
One of the functions of schooling is to help parents realise this growth in them. Until such time they are still subject to parental authority and control, still dependent on adults.
Hence the terrible contradiction.
On the one hand nature confirms them as adults in no uncertain terms, but, on the other hand, society denies them adult status, confirming them instead as still children.
In some respects they feel like adults but must behave like children. The longer they are required to attend school in order to qualify as adults, the more protracted the contradiction.
Its protracted nature is largely a function of modern society. Most pre-modern societies had puberty rituals to resolve the contradiction quickly.
Puberty rituals
Somewhere around the time of puberty, either singly or in batches, a child was put through a ritual, at the end of which he or she was confirmed as an adult.
Rituals varied between societies, and varied as well between the sexes, and in the amount of time, which could be from one day to many months.
But as the French anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, discovered nearly a century ago, these puberty rituals, like all other rituals of transformation, such as marriage and death, are marked by three phases.
The first phase is separation. Invariably the child is separated from family, friends, home. The place of separation may be a temple or the bush or some other sacred space.
Under the care of one or more elders, they are subjected to a series of acts, sometimes testing and very painful, which put them in what van Gennep called the liminal phase, from the Latin word limen, that is threshold.
When one stands in the threshold of a house or any building, one is neither inside nor outside. Liminality describes this phase of the ritual because the child is no longer being treated indulgently as a child, but is not being treated as an adult either.
The third phase, reintegration, begins when, having passed the test, so to speak, the child is welcomed back into the village and confirmed as an adult.
The story of Jesus being taken by his parents up to the temple to be circumcised is a story of him undergoing a puberty ritual. He was separated from his parents, and taken by the elders and put through a painful test, which he evidently passed.
His acquisition of adult status made it possible for him to engage in the discourse of the elders. Were he not yet a man, his boldness would have been considered an affront, instead of the marvel that the elders found it.
Nelson Mandela recounts in his autobiography the puberty ritual he was put through, the tests he had to pass, and thereafter his eligibility to serve at court.
We in Jamaica have no puberty rituals. We have no institutional means of conferring adult status on our children.
They simply grow under our care and only when they find a job and begin to earn their own money do we recognise them as "big".
As members of my generation would recall, prior to the reform of the education system, when a child "out school" at age 15, he or she joined the labour market.
Now with universal secondary education, we have added three more years on to adolescence.
And, we should bear in mind, the age of physiological maturity is actually falling. Girls are ovulating as early as age 12, with reports of cases as young as age 10.
Having no puberty rituals, we also have no "elders" to whom to entrust the transition of our children to adult status.
Thrown into a protracted liminal state by nature and society, they are left up to their own devices, unless they are lucky enough to find someone, whether parent, relative, friend or teacher, to mentor them and give them guidance and safe passage through.
Burning issues
Generally speaking, there are three burning issues that confront our adolescents.
The first is their personal identity. This is the time when they become extremely self-conscious, if not self-centred, spending more time than ever before the mirror, consumed with doubts about their attractiveness, conscious of their tremendous skills and powers, testing their sense of being adult. The issue of identity is acute precisely because of their liminal existence.
The second issue is their sexuality. They can feel their sexual power for the first time, but have no approved means of carrying it through to climax. Nature drives them on, society restrains them, limiting them to the curse of Tantalus.
They experiment nonetheless, finding ways to engage in intercourse. This, on average, is the time of first sex for both boys and girls. Alarmingly, because of AIDS, most first sex is unplanned, and therefore unprotected.
Knowing that girls are especially vulnerable, parents suddenly erect new walls of control around them. Those who do get pregnant unwittingly end up accelerating their transition to womanhood, but they pay an exacting price - they drop out of school, never to return, quickly become mothers a second, third or even a fourth time, and are significantly more dependent on men.
But for the well-known and celebrated success of the Women's Centre in staying these effects, we would have a serious problem, what with the heightened public exploitation of female sexuality by media advertising and dance hall culture.
For the boys, of course, no one cares or shows that they care. The society assumes that the males will somehow learn to handle their sexuality with maturity, without realising that its excessive homophobia actually pushes the adolescent male into early heterosexual contact.
The third problem is their preoccupation with the design of their future. Parents, the education system, the rest of the society force them to think about this. Their own realisation of hitherto unknown potential also helps.
This is the time when they dream of lighting up the universe with their stardom. The males are especially vulnerable here. They are more easily deceived by the short-lived glamour of DJ and football stardom, losing out on solid foundation for life which formal education provides.
This is the nature of the period of life called adolescence, and these are the storms churning up their lives.
The protective devices set up by parents and communities ensure that most girls make it to shore safely, but there being none for our boy children many boys do not.
The parents of some of those killed by the police in Braeton did not know where their sons were at the wee hour of that fateful morning.
In one of the inner-city communities in which Janet Brown and I studied the socialisation process, the person terrorising the community was a 14-year-old drug pusher. He bought sex when he wanted and held a vision of himself escaping to the United States one day soon, where he would lay down arms and take up the books.
Our adolescents, particularly our males, need mentoring and help to see them through adolescence.
This burden falls on the school system as a whole and on our teachers. It is our teachers who must perform the role of elders, in whose hands are entrusted that ritual process of transforming children into adults.
Mentoring
In the history of the profession, teachers have never been merely transmitters of knowledge; they serve as moulders of character, as mentors.
But never in the brief history of our people is the need for such mentors greater. And when such mentoring is failing, the Programme for Alternative Student Support, an excellent innovation of the Ministry of Education, gives the toughest, the most incorrigible and recalcitrant their best chance yet of making the transition successfully.
Before expelling its five students, the Munro School Board should demonstrate that it understands fully the problem of adolescence, that its teachers not only tried with the boys, but that they even turned to the Programme for Alternative Student Support.
Ganja smoking is a criminal offence and socially reprehensible to many people. But so is driving daddy's car without licence or permission.
Adolescence is a period for testing skills at infracting rules, even criminally sanctioned ones, and getting away with it. It is a time for developing skills in risk taking.
Let that adult man declare himself who as an adolescent infracted no rules, played no practical joke, deviated not one inch from the narrow order imposed by parents and society.
The danger lies not so much in having done it, but in the breaking of rules becoming a part of character. Only guidance can make the difference. Guidance and mentoring sometimes require punishment, but the objective is not to crush our children, but to help them.
Real issue
Thus, the issue is not that the five boys should not be punished for the offence, but whether this offence - and apparently it was their first - merited the severity of expulsion.
Dr. Brian Morgan speaks with much wisdom in not only opposing the expulsion but in pointing out the inequity in merely suspending the sixth former who extorted money from the boys.
Not only is this sixth former's offence the greater crime, but he is, or was, a leader among the students, no doubt soon to graduate. The unfortunate underlying principle, thus, is that experimenting with ganja smoking is much worse than extortion.
The fact is that both expelled and extortionist need mentoring, the latter more than the former. Not only was his crime morally the more reprehensible, but also being older and on the verge of completing the transition to adulthood, he betrayed the school's ideals, if not its rules. His is a race against time.
The others have a little more time on their side to learn the true goal of discipline, which is self-imposed order, if only they were allowed the compassion of the tough-minded adults.
Upholding the discipline of the school may be a matter of punishment, in the first instance - you infract, you are punished.
Admittedly there are infractions, like carrying arms and dangerous weapons, felonious wounding, murder, which so threatened the well-being of the other members of the school community that they could warrant not mentoring, but complete separation.
Outside of such breaches, however, punishment seeks to reform, to induce self-directed and internalised conformity.
What has made Munro great, what will make any school great, is not the saintliness of its intake but the character of its output.
Not even the monastery expects sainthood from its novices. Greatness is achieved and traditions built not in producing saints out of saints, but in bending the wayward, reigning in the recalcitrant, taming the wild, building the self-control of the uncontrollable.
And if the school is not the institution to undertake this task, along with parents, who will?
These are children, not adults. These are our future, not our present.
Barry Chevannes is Professor & Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of the West Indies, Mona.
