Our editorial of Tuesday February 26 sought to make a case for holding parents more accountable for children who attend schools and who demonstrate a proclivity for violent behaviour that becomes disruptive and dangerous to the wider school population. The unpalatable reality – based on evidence which the Ministry of Education has long had at its disposal − is that there are schoolchildren who demonstrate an appetite for serious levels of violence.
We believe − and we said so in our February 26 editorial − that (a) there may well be instances in which the school authorities (heads of schools and teachers) may have already ceded a degree of control to school bullies; (b) the school bullies have been emboldened by the diminished authority of the teachers; (c) many teachers fear for their own safety and (d) the Ministry of Education is either blissfully unaware of the sheer scale of the problem, or else, had embarked on a studied policy of burying their heads in the sand. It would not surprise us if there even were cases in which parents were indifferent to their children’s proclivity for violence and, equally disturbing, if the unwholesome school environment resulting from the violence may actually have resulted in the diminished performance of teachers who, understandably, would be affected by it. Here, the point should be made, again, that the Ministry of Education appears to have made no serious attempt to research the phenomenon.
The main point which we made in last Tuesday’s editorial had to do with what we believe is the need for the creation of a binding contract between the Ministry of Education and parents, and it is to this point that we return in the wake of the Wisburg Secondary revelation. We explained that part of that contract ought to hold parents accountable for the behaviour of their children. We claim no expertise in this particular area beyond many of us either being parents of school-age children or having once been in that situation. We are persuaded by our own experience that parents are likely to be among the leading experts on the behaviour of their own children and that any attempt to tackle the problem of violence among schoolchildren simply will not succeed unless parents are intimately involved in the process; so that the quicker the Ministry starts sitting down with parents across the country, the better the chances of the problem being tackled effectively in the shortest possible time.
A few days after the publication of the February 26 editorial we published a report on an incident at the Wisburg Secondary School in which a young teacher was seriously injured by a falling table top, a trap reportedly set for her by students in a form which she was about to teach. The incident would, of course, have been no less serious if it had turned out to be an absurd schoolboy prank except, of course, that the incident appears to have been intended as a serious show of force by the perpetrators since another teacher was reportedly told that she was next on what can only be described as a ‘hit list,’ pretty heady stuff for secondary school students.
From what we have learnt it appears that the perpetrators of the deed had, by their actions, succeeded in creating such a toxic environment in the school that other teachers, chastened as they had become by their colleague’s misfortune, were reportedly reluctant to enter their classrooms for fear of having some injury visited upon them.
We believe that the Wisburg Secondary incident illustrates in some measure the loss of control/authority which heads of schools and teachers are experiencing in the face of the prevailing surfeit of violence in schools. Some teachers now openly concede that many of their charges are beyond the authority of the school and that they operate as laws unto themselves.
As far as we are aware the Ministry of Education has made no public pronouncement on the Wisburg Secondary incident. If it appears that the Ministry has, of late, taken the position that some incidents do not warrant a public statement, we do not believe that an information blackout should be applied in a case where a violent incident results in serious injury to either a teacher or another student.
It would also be interesting to observe the manner in which the Education Ministry handles this matter, whether, for example, the parents of the offending children (if the children are known) as much as the children themselves are made to answer for what happened to the teacher and for what appears to be their reign of terror in the school; whether the Ministry – given its substantive responsibility to provide safe spaces for its students and its teachers – will bear the cost of the injured teacher’s medical expenses and possible material compensation, and whether this might not be an appropriate instance in which to apply our recommended parent-school contract. Again, while we embrace the maxim that no child should be denied the right to an education, equally, we believe that the nature of the Wisburg Secondary incident ought to empower the school to require the parents of the culpable children to make alternative arrangements for their education. Nor should such actions as are applied by the school prejudice such legal measures as might be pursued in order to punish the perpetrators.
The Wisburg Secondary incident amounts to an embarrassing challenge – not the first one but a particularly embarrassing one – to the assertion made by the Ministry of Education more than a year ago that the problem of violence in schools was being brought under control, a claim which, even then, was dismissed as no more than wishful thinking. The Ministry of Education may justifiably claim that it cannot fairly be held responsible for what appears to be an increasing proclivity for violence among school-age children. It cannot, however, continue to fail in its search for solutions to what would appear to be a worsening problem without attracting some measure of public criticism.
We say again that the circumstances of the Wisburg Secondary incident cry out for the urgent application of the recommendation made in February 26 editorial that parents be brought to the table as a matter of the utmost urgency and that they be required to sign on to a binding contract with the schools. The Ministry of Education can no longer be under any illusions about its tattered credibility in this matter.