Dear Editor,
Many citizens have lamented that Guyana needs to resume beating and flogging children in schools to prevent the children from beating and injuring each other. Others have said to bring back beating, with prayers in the school. Because beating children and prayers in the schools in the past created the wonderful non-violent peace loving Guyanese adults today.
Guyana has not stopped beating children in schools. There is a myth going around, that promoting the rights of children has created the situation of violent schools. The Ministry still allows teachers to beat and flog children. The Ministry has no intention of encouraging and supporting the teachers who are refusing to flog and beat the children.
Maybe one of the reasons that the Ministry of Education cannot reveal the results of investigations of parental conflicts with teachers is the problem where some of those conflicts have started where teachers have hit children, and injured them. Maybe some of those investigations will reveal that the inability of the Ministry to deal with bullying, resulted in the culture of ‘stand up to your bullies, represent yourself’, which resulted in more tragedy.
There was a valid protest against violence against teachers. But that protest makes no sense, if there is no protest and work done to stop violence against children. The Guyana Teachers Union cannot expect others to do unto its members what it will not do for children in their care.
And all violence is connected. We cannot expect children to do what adults are not doing. Guyana’s political landscape features the threat of violence, and violence sometimes. There is intense violence on the roadways. And if anything to show from the recent workplace incident, the educated, the professional can find themselves resorting to violence.
And because some powerful people need violence to retain power, we will not solve any of the violence problems in Guyana. There are stories of teachers and schools who are not using violence in their classrooms. Many parents have stopped beating or don’t beat their children. But those stories are rarely told of course, because the trauma of believing that another world is possible is probably worse than the everyday trauma of believing that children can be peaceful when adults are not.
Yours faithfully,
Vidyaratha Kissoon
