YOUTH AND VIOLENCE
Broken down topic- Violence in school
THEME: The factors contributing of violence in school and the effects which it has on children ages 13-18.
Take new look at school violence
Story Created: Jul 1, 2010 at 4:46 AM ECT
Story Updated: Jul 1, 2010 at 4:46 AM ECT
The violence in the El Dorado schools didn’t develop overnight. Nor is it likely that these two schools are any better or worse than other secondary institutions whose pupil population comes from a comparable demographic. The Education Ministry’s statistics show that 70 per cent of problem schools are located along the East-West corridor. If the El Dorado schools are in the spotlight now, so too was Arima Government some years ago, or Mucurapo Secondary before that; and so too will other schools be in the spotlight before too long. Unless, that is, the education technocrats, encouraged by new leadership at the political level, change their approach to this issue.
Violence in schools has been a preoccupation of the Ministry for much of the last decade, over the periods of two successive PNM administrations. Conferences have been held, and foreign and local consultants hired. Yet the El Dorado West and El Dorado East schools, to cite the instant example, have become a whiteboard jungle within which feral juvenile delinquents prey on peaceable and other peers. The Ministry’s much-touted “Peace Plan”, in place for over seven years now, has produced less than stellar results.
School Violence Schools Students Youth
Violence in Schools Violence among youth, especially in schools, is one of American society's most pressing concerns. It is also a source of controversy. While no recent nationwide study of the real extent of youth violence is available, small-scale and regional studies indicate that youth violence is increasing, at least slightly. In addition, youth, like adults, are now more frequently using ...
Ministry technocrats should consider the possibility that this failure is partly because the causes of violence listed in the plan are so vacuous: “television, movies, video-games”, “breakdown in family”, even “world violence”. The research on media influence on youth violence remains equivocal; family patterns in Trinidad and Tobago haven’t changed in the past 20 years; and “world violence”, even if it did once improbably affect our local situation, has arguably declined.
Since persisting in the same course of action in expectation of a different outcome is one definition of madness, we hope that the Education Ministry will be revamping all the approaches which have seen less than brilliant success over the past decade. The two El Dorado schools were always a recipe for trouble, and competent advisers could have told the Ministry’s planners about the famous experiments which show that dividing children into groups invariably arouses intense rivalries. So one effective strategy would be, if not to merge the El Dorado West and El Dorado East schools, to increase co-operation between them.
More immediately, the pupils causing most of the trouble, surely must be an easily identified minority, and have to be disciplined or removed. But Education Minister Tim Gopeesingh must also be concluding that the solution includes replacement of the principals, since discharging their mandate to manage those schools is demonstrably beyond their capacities.
Reducing violence in schools is no short-term task. But, with a judicious mixture of carrot-and-stick strategies based on proper analysis, and applied with firmness and consistency, the problem can be solved, or much reduced in scope, sooner rather than later.
