Dear Editor,
It is difficult not to be most apprehensive of the profound implications inherent in the cris de coeur of Dr. Brian O’Toole, Director of School of the Nations, seen in SN’s columns of February 11, 2019.
The picture he projects would have been gloomier, had he not survived to issue a most timely warning of the psychological precipice on which our young generations appear to be teetering.
The prospect of how deleterious is the environment created by the new accessible technology is immediately frightening – for victim youths, bemused parents and under-prepared teachers.
But there are variations to this theme – drugs – about which other private institutions have been known to have exercised expulsive discipline in as discrete a manner as possible.
Indications are that another substantive under-belly of the education system has been exposed; but which can no longer be ignored.
Decades ago a professor at the University of California had pronounced that it was a fallacy for parents to claim that they knew their progeny well enough, because ‘We were children like you’.
It is certainly not the case now that our children are grappling with a new invasive environment to which their parents have been unaccustomed.
The difference between them in viewing the world is palpable.
Too few parents have garnered the emotional intelligence to deal adequately with this subterranean imbalance, of which mimicry is a very visible factor.
So that it is urgent that the protective parties concerned take proactive action to stem what could be a societal dislocation of tsunamic proportions in the not too distant future.
As Dr. O’Toole has remarked, parents and teachers are caught in a limbo of uncoordinated rehabilitative action, albeit within a wider education system. Whose then is the responsibility for organising relevant restorative programmes, which would help both parent and teachers to protect and/or rescue their children from a threatened perversion?
In the first, and final, analysis it is the Ministry of Education who must take the initiative to garner the talents of administrators, teachers, parents and critically youth representation, to undertake a comprehensive analysis, not only of the local situation, but also of comparable environments elsewhere, utilising the same technologies for appropriate information and guidance.
Together they must formulate a creative strategy aimed at saving selves, others and our future.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
