Teachers to blame for poor standards

On the day a dormitory at Stephjoy Boys' Secondary School was torched last week, I came across a Facebook post that was infuriating and insensitive; even criminal. It was a photograph of a secondary school girl in uniform forced to wear a cut manila paper around her neck with the inscription 'it is my hobby to urinate on beds'.

Bed wetting is one of the most humiliating things in a person's life. Adding salt to injury by ridiculing what is a medical condition only compounds an already worse situation. I know how humiliating that is because, I must admit, it is a situation I went through and I could feel the weight of the embarrassment on that girl's psyche. As a youngster, I tried all the crazy traditional remedies to overcome that degrading condition to no avail. Mercifully, it went off abruptly on its own.

I know of a young girl, my friends' daughter, who sometimes out of embarrassment that neighbours and friends would know of her little failing, did not dry her beddings. Continually sleeping on a wet mattress has its own side effects, apart from the stink it raises. When she joined secondary school, from scoring highly in the first two terms of schooling she dropped in the third term. By the time she joined Form Two she was averaging E. She constantly clashed with dorm mates and the matron over failure to air her beddings. What that did was put her on the defensive, made her become aggressive and generally uncooperative. In the end, she was expelled.

I personally found her another school where the deputy headmistress sympathised with her situation. Through candid discussions with the matron and dormitory prefect, they befriended, counselled and made her feel appreciated. In exactly three months, she overcame her problem and became one of the best performers. She is now at university pursuing her dream career, but I doubt she would have made anything out of her education at the previous school because the teachers there did not take time to understand her.

Teachers take on the wider role of educating, parenting, guiding and counselling in a society that has increasingly abdicated the critical responsibility of parenting to them. The quest for knowledge and better grades means students are virtual prisoners in school, with hardly time to interact with family and relatives during holidays.

Thus, family values and societal bonding are sacrificed because there is no time for anything else but books. As good as that may be, it has its downside manifested in negative behavioural changes and skewed perceptions.

The onus on teachers is such that only those who took on the profession as a vocation, can cope. The tragedy is that a limitation in the job market has forced some sadists into joining the teaching fraternity for want of something to do for a pay. We are constantly decrying indiscipline and falling standards in schools, yet some teachers play a role in lowering them by acting irresponsibly. Cases of teachers raping small children are on the rise. Punishment for infractions is sometimes excessive, not commensurate with the offence. There is no interface on which students interact freely with their teachers on matters that may not necessarily be academic. They are not encouraged to share their misgivings on anything and even when teachers are in the wrong, students cannot point it out.

Occasionally, the threat of expulsion is used to intimidate parents and students. One may argue that courts the are open, but the cost and time are not worth the bother. The excessive powers principals wield over teachers, students and parents ought to be whittled down to reduce their despotism and guarantee fair play.