Hilary Robertson-Hickling

In a recently written memoir Carly Fiorina the former chief executive officer (CEO) of HP Hewlett Packard identified the tough choices which she had to make in her career.

The most intriguing choices surrounded her rise and fall as the CEO who had forged one of the largest mergers in history between the family-dominated company Hewlett Packard and Compaq. The book examined the tumultuous change being managed as well as the politics involved in a changing industry and global environment.

Fiorina had to battle with the culture of the information and communication industry and as a woman in a period of change.

She had to oversee job cuts, devise news strategies, face a hostile media and get what she described as a 'thousand tribes' to work together. That meant that companies which normally operated with narrow interests needed to grasp the big corporate picture.

Educational deterioration

In Jamaica we need the 'thousand tribes' to unite over such issues as the deterioration of the educational system. The founders and alumni of Jamaica's first technical school Kingston Technical which is more than 100 years old must be horrified at the kind of stewardship that tolerates young hoodlums and terrorists in the making with feeble excuses.

This situation and that at Camperdown and elsewhere point to the capacity of a small number of hooligans to disrupt the learning of their colleagues and themselves and destroy the reputations of institutions. I suspect that those persons who are sympathetic to the wrongdoers would not send their children to those schools.

I am amazed to hear people in authority supporting reprehensible conduct on the pretext that those children need to go to school.

Well, their parents should be given the option of home-schooling them or getting them to comply with the rules of the school. There was a very sad cartoon, in which a schoolgirl was concerned that the criminals who would attack her might be her fellow students.

Children who are violent; who are explicitly sexual in their conduct; who are disruptive and making life hell for the other students and teachers need to be removed from the educational system for a time-out when rehabilitation can take place.

In the system, they are toxic and their parents can continue to escape responsibility for their actions. I think that any school board or educational policy that rewards deviance must be brought to book. Tough choices are unpopular but absolutely necessary to ensure that we stop this downward slide.

Fiorina was fired by the board of her company which later acknowledged that it had been wrong. Fiorina wrote the book to tell her side of the story.

Courage for change

Who will sympathise with the students and teachers that are suffering and who will tell their story? I know that what happens is that those who can afford to do so find a way to remove their children from the negative influences.

When will we have the courage to do what is right in this country? When parents, teachers and students commit criminal offences they must face the law and if there are mitigating circumstances they can be brought forward. It is time that we stop naming schools for outstanding persons who are being defamed by the conduct of a few.

Tough choices are necessary and the laissez faire approach must be replaced bya pro-active approach. In a time when schools are requiring students to sign contracts to agree with the school rules we have to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to bad behaviour and badmanism. Our children need to learn in a safe environment and we need to expand the Safe Schools Programme. The choice is ours.