Hillary Robertson -Hickling
JAMAICANS OF a certain age would have been aware of the pact forged by parents and teachers when children were handed over into the care and protection of the teacher. As someone told me his mother told the teacher,' you are responsible for him and her now." The situation was such that a transgression and beating at school could not be mentioned at home as a repeat beating would have been in order. We have now progressed to the point where children have stabbed teachers in two rural schools in the last week and a mother has been sentenced to a prison term for beating a teacher. So we have moved from a partnership which albeit some might find misguided to a situation of all out war.
While I am not an advocate for corporal punishment it strikes me that many parents have now abdicated their responsibility and even become the aggressor in an increasingly adversarial relationship with the teacher. At a time when it is clear from the conduct of students at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels that the systems of socialisation at home have broken down. It is clear that some children are in charge of their homes, and that their parents have become negligent, indulgent or gone AWOL. We are creating bands of terrorists right in our homes.
IMPOSSIBLE JOB
The school is then asked to do an impossible job. It has received a basket to carry water. My proposal is that parents who cannot see eye to eye with the school must be asked to home-school their children. The present governance structures in many schools are faltering, weak school boards, weak Ministry of Education inspections and oversight, weak leadership and students who are operating at the lowest levels. Programmes such as Change from Within led by Pauletta Chevannes have achieved success and must be expanded.
My fervent prayer is that the transformation team will include former principals like Radley Reid who maintained excellence in the Jamaican school system. It is time that we highlight those persons who have found solutions and stop the promotion of the mediocre persons as a result of loyalty and patronage. It must not be a bureaucratic exercise undertaken by persons who neither understand nor care about the Jamaican educational system.
PROMOTING DISUNITY
Instead of a contract for the development of the next generation, we are promoting the usual disunity and conflict and unfortunately copying as much as we can from the American school system which is failing at every other level than that of the elite level. The United Kingdom presents a similar picture and some ethnic minorities especially the African-Caribbean and the African-American children are failing badly. In the United States there are more African-American youngsters in prison than in college. As we see nannies are being asked to intervene in the homes of the wealthy and the public school systems are falling apart.
While I realise that the teaching force is not perfect and that there are many efforts to upgrade and improve teachers, similar work has to be done with students and parents. If teachers stop caring about the children, ignoring them and their potential then we know that the University of the Prison is waiting to educate them.
Hilary Robertson-Hickling is a lecturer in the Department of Management Studies, UWI, Mona.
