No easy fix solutions

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

Placing difficult children in boot camps and similar institutions is not the best action to take, as we grapple with indiscipline in our schools.

Citizens should be concerned with the many knee jerk solutions we are promoting and implementing to curb negative social trends.

I find the term ‘boot camp’ psychologically dangerous because it is really grounded in semi–military philosophy and could be a profoundly serious turnoff for many parents who do not know what to do with difficult children.

Those promoting boot camps should also be honest enough to inform parents that they were originally intended for teens who were on their way to becoming criminals or had broken the law, and prison was too harsh.

They also need to inform parents that there is a need for after care to monitor such children when they leave boot camp because, having been taken out of the broader school /society, they would have to adjust after they return. The question is: do we have competent professionals assigned
to schools to manage such matters?

Many children demonstrating anti-social skills are the products of a negative environment and unless we get serious and begin to address the reasons for their behaviour, we could very well end up creating societal Frankensteins rather than the little angels we would all love them to become.

Dysfunctional homes, drugs, peer pressure, divorces, economic hardship, absentee parents, and drug-addicted parents could be some of the factors contributing to the problem.

Furthermore, while we bury our collective heads in the sand, our island state is swiftly making the transition from Little England to Little America; there are signs that being our brother’s keeper is not part of the emerging society. Coupled with two political parties that have succeeded in having a one-party state within a two-party system, we really need progressive independent thinkers and not party sycophants and opportunists to come forward and rescue us before it is too late.

Education has been a political football since the mid-seventies and that is why we are now throwing our hands up in the air and blaming demons and things that move about in the night for our predictable predicament.

Parents were unleashed on the teaching profession in the seventies and the collective political managerial class delighted in castigating the profession for any and every reason. It is time that we get more clinical in dealing with our children and cut out ready-mix concrete solutions. We need to remember that we are not building houses, but future leaders and productive citizens.

We are speaking as if our children are prefabricated homes that can be set up anywhere once there is an appropriate house spot.

It is obvious that there is now widespread panic, and most people believe that the schools are like war zones. This is not so at all.

What we have is an educational system that is quickly becoming an albatross around the neck of national development and there is widespread boredom, in addition to all the maladies we constantly hear or read about.

–William Skinner is a Caribbean social commentator.