WE CONDEMN and abhor the current spate of indiscipline and violence at the Melrose Primary and Junior High School involving not only some of the students, but parents in the community as well, who are acting like savages, sociopaths with callous disregard for the moral well-being of their own children. An eighth grade pupil (probably 13 years of age) slaps a teacher in the face because he has been reprimanded and the teacher has to be hidden from the boy's uncle and a group of hooligans who threaten to kill him and bomb the school if the boy is expelled.
What seems to be happening in the Little Kew Road community and in many other parts of Jamaica is moral depravity at a mob level with no sense of limits or regrets, out of control and feeding on itself.
Some boys at Melrose have already started their careers as extortionists, feeding on their fellow students in partnership with depraved adults in the area. School equipment is vandalised and stolen and a student's mother is seen selling the stolen items. This mother may only be 14 years old herself, for violence is not the only thing that breeds in this area. Guns are openly taken to school and bullets exchanged or sold on the compound.
Pity the poor teachers who bravely endure such an environment. Has the Ministry of Education abrogated its responsibility to provide security for inner-city schools and protect teachers in the system? Given such barbarity, what steps is Dr. Peter Phillips, the Minister of National Security, and MP for the constituency, taking to control the situation? There may, indeed, be some good people in the community but they are obviously too intimidated for their voices to be heard.
The Melrose melodrama is not an isolated performance. Vendors and school officials engage in angry confrontations and students even kill each other at the slightest provocation. The new anti-crime initiatives seem to have lost some of their shine as the murder rate begins to climb again 60, year to-date.
The present moral crisis may be the denouement of years of official acquiescence in a bankrupt ethical rhetoric that proclaims politics to be the art of the possible and that, therefore, the end justifies the means to obtain it, no matter how heinous these means may be. When will talk of values and attitudes be energised into action? Or, must things get worse before they can get better?
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
