By John J. Searchwell, ContributorSENATOR JOHNSON would not let this sleeping dog lie and has drawn into his net some herrings of varied hues. I am therefore prompted to make some observations that could help interested persons to a better understanding of the affair and the Minister's position. These are based on over fifty years of direct involvement in formal education.
I went to what could best be called a comprehensive school, with infant, intermediate and upper departments in the free, elementary section and a fee-paying secondary department. The person who received me as pupil into the infant department was the Headmaster of the secondary and of the entire school. After this I was a student at the Jamaica School of Agriculture (residential), then on to university.
My teaching career began in a small rural grant-aided secondary school where only six or so pupils were not boarders. It went on to another small rural school (private secondary) with most pupils as boarders, then to another private secondary in the city where the Headmaster provided boarding for about twenty pupils, and to a grant-aided town school with about equal numbers of boarders and day pupils.
At all levels from university to infant I attended in all five institutions and taught at seven. I do not recall ever receiving or seeing at any of them a book or list of rules to guide my conduct as pupil, student or teacher. Not until towards the closing years of my service did I become familiar as President of the JTA I had to with the Ministry of Education's Code of Regulations and the JTA's Code of Ethics, bibles for school management and for professional conduct.
But it was understood that you obeyed the laws of the land and behaved in an acceptable manner. For pupils this was determined by something we called home-training, and even if you had enough of it but transgressed outside your home any older person in the community could bring you to book and be thanked for it.
THE BEGINNING
Now in the beginning in Jamaica schools were just called schools e.g. Wolmer's, Rusea's (no primary, elementary, whatever) and were established for the neighbourhood children of the white underclass (masons, wheelwrights, etc.) and of slave women and their masters. They came to be called secondary, aka high schools. In the early part of the last century there were only some twenty-odd of these schools, nine in Kingston-St Andrew alone, none in St Thomas and St Mary, none with boys in St Ann and Trelawny and two were just being established in Clarendon.
Transportation was very limited. There was one train daily (seven to eight hours) MoBay to Kingston, same the other way, two both ways between Port Antonio and Kingston, one from places like Frankfield and Linstead. When bus services were first provided it was a case of all roads leading to Kingston once per day from the parish capitals, more or less.
As a result of these conditions each school had a small catchment area, and to extend this area they developed boarding on their own premises or made arrangements outside. A further consequence of this situation in the context of the heightened recognition by the middle and working classes that education was the driving force for social mobility and economic growth was a proliferation of private secondary schools, especially in the Kingston area. Pupils were attracted by awards of half scholarships, and all the larger ones Excelsior being the chief provided some boarding accommodation.
It was Percival Gibson first as "Priest", next Canon, then Bishop who initiated the decline of boarding in and by schools. He realised and demonstrated that money for education was better spent on classrooms than on housing, and he developed Kingston College as a very local school with no boarding provided whatever. This explains how KC quickly became the largest school, as it still is today.
But there are other and often specific reasons why parents send their children to boarding school. At one extreme are those who do not want the bother of raising (their) children. At the other are those who want for them the structured environment, the regularity and discipline, the removal from the distractions available in living at home, the loosing from the apron strings. And there are some extraordinary cases.
One such is the lad whose home shared a fence with a school. A five-minute Sunday afternoon stroll could have taken him from his gate to a classroom. He went to boarding school over one hundred miles away. (His father was an Old Boy of the next-door school and Chairman of its Board). For another lad the main entrance to his home was just across the road from the side entrance to a school, not twenty yards. He too went away, some eighty miles. Yet another, from a neighbouring town, went to boarding school a further fifty-odd miles away.
By one of those tragic ironies all three lads had to return to attend the school next door where they were able in the stone the builders rejected to pass the School Certificate which allowed them to embark on the road to professions in the footsteps of their fathers. For them the first choice had nothing at all to do with what schools are normally expected to help their pupils achieve. That first choice? Munro.
An even stranger case is that of a certain country family. The father was benefactor to the local school and at one time Chairman of its Board. The mother once taught there and was also at one time its Board Chairman. All their children were sent to boarding school well over one hundred miles away. It is perhaps more than coincidence that for the boys in this family the school was, again, Munro.
The point here is that there is something extra about boarding school and people will go to great lengths to get their children into them. What makes it so is that for about 36 weeks in each of five years school serves as home at an impressionable stage in the lives of its pupils. School becomes the extended family, and every worker, from Principal to the last and least groundsman, stands in loco parentis to all the children. This is particularly so of the Matron, the Nurse and the kitchen staff, while teachers serve as role models as well.
This is perhaps especially true of Munro because of its isolation in arce sitam, like but moreso than the other four surviving schools with boarders. Until Malvern reaches the dimensions of Portmore, Munro, more than other such schools, will remain in relative isolation, despite the transportation available, and retain its character, the last boarder.
Now my information is that in general getting transfer from a school is a simple enough matter but transfer TO, moreso as boarder and for other than Sixth Form is like trying to keep a snowball frozen in hell. Yet at one shot three boys were able to get transfers as boarders to Munro. Their circumstances must have been special. And they had hardly settled in for their very first term when they found two local lads and engaged in transgression.
From here on the story becomes rather convoluted. The act was discovered and the boys were promised leniency if they confessed. They did and leniency took the form of suspension, further suspension then expulsion; their parents appealed to the Minister who referred the matter to the appropriate legal office on whose advice he acted; (this as I get it, is after weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with the parties involved, including the Board. In my book this is not how one takes unilateral action).
At this all hell broke loose. But what is basically at issue is whether due process has been observed, whether anyone has acted improperly in law. For six months I was a non-legal worker in the office of the Solicitor to Her Majesty's Treasury, almost next door to the British Houses of Parliament. There I started to understand how law operates and discovered that on technicalities figuratively and literally people get away with murder, much less smoking a spliff, the kind of circumstance of which Senator Johnson the historian must be well aware.
Now Minister Whiteman took an oath before God and the people of this nation to obey the law and the constitution. So too did Senator Johnson and the Leader of the Opposition. The Minister has the duty to carry out and the power to make, modify and remake regulations relating to the exercise of his portfolio. The way I see it, after the parents observed due process in appealing to the Minister the appropriate due process was followed and the expulsion revoked. Anyone wanting or expecting him to have done otherwise would be wanting him to forswear his oath and act improperly. The Board had acted improperly in law, and so long as we subscribe and adhere to the rule of law in our land we must, all of us, regardless of our preferences, uphold the Minister.
SOME ARGUE
Some argue that the Minister ruled on a technicality, but technicality is illustrated by the story about Norman Manley defending a motorist for breaking a stop sign. Such a sign as we know is octagonal in shape, painted red and white. Manley won the case because the sign in the matter was round and therefore, in law, technically not a stop sign. The plain fact is that there were set procedures that the Board did not follow and this absolved the boys.
Now I may be wrong in believing that there is a certain point that has not surfaced in the debate, and it is this: Let us suppose that the Minister had turned down the appeal. And let us put the Senator and the Leader of the Opposition in those parents' shoes. I believe they would have taken the matter to court and if necessary all the way to Privy Council. I also believe Privy Council would have granted the appeal. The appellants would have won but they, their children and all the other parties involved would have lost in the waiting and waiting (how many years?) and the legal wrangling it would have entailed.
In my humble view had the offence taken place at a day school, perhaps at any other school, the matter would not have reached even the school gates much less the Minister, the Press and the public. And if we keep raking we are sure to find a lot of muck, to open a Pandora's box. What seems critical is that the boys concerned need a chance for redemption, that some mechanism be set up to help them find that redemption, and since this has become a public issue the public needs assurance that this is being done. In the meantime and at any rate let the Munro community be given a chance to recover and return to what it is there for. And, in common parlance, big up Minister Whiteman!
