School = prison?
November 19, 2006 by Marguerite Orane
Filed under Accept
Here is another e-mail conversation between my sister, niece and me about what really goes on in the education system – we are speaking here about secondary schools. I am sharing this because I believe that the only way to solve a problem is to come out of denial and face it squarely. We MUST stop the “prettying up”, the “but some good things are happening”, and just plain lying about what’s really happening! Each of us has a responsibility to do what we can, wherever we are!
Zahra, my niece, started with this:
“Yesterday I discovered that one my students (who’s a great student, tries really hard to excel, and is also known as my ‘son’) was put on 4 days’ suspension for ‘extorting’ money from a 9th grader. Today, on his 2nd day of suspension, I found out that he was picked up by police in the morning for being out on the street smoking weed. Sigh.
In the staff sign-in book at school, there are often announcements that so-and-so is on suspension and is not to be allowed in class. This tells me that the children WANT to be there, and do not want to be out on the street. I ignored this rule once last term when one of my suspended students showed up for our class. SIGH”
Carole’s response:
“extort – suspend – nuttin a gwan – hang out – smoke up – get ketch – lock up – beat up – caan bodder no more….. May as well have just put him in jail instead of school. This is NOT a strategy – to quote a Sister P supporter, it’s a STRAGEDY. Whatever happened to nourishing and cherishing the child – teach him how he should grow??? Sorry I can’t be supportive with empathy…I’m too mad”
Marguerite chimed in:
“It has often struck me that school and jail are quite similar:
1. The design of public schools – note the preponderance of concrete; no green; holes instead of windows, etc.
2. Students are “locked down” at school – they are shoved into overcrowded cells (classrooms) and can’t come out until school is over
3. They are faced with the most authoritarian figures (teachers) – not dissimilar to prison warders”
Zahra:
“MO, you are so right. And a preponderance of concrete, no green, no windows, etc. breeds ‘bad’ behavior, anger, the need to control, etc. Some of the classrooms at XXX School are horrifyingly AWFUL. I would go mad having to learn and/or teach in there all day every day.
By the way, speaking of prison, another one of my students and his classmates had to kneel on concrete for about half an hour yesterday. They’d been playing cards/gambling in a classroom.
And it’s okay, CDOA, no sympathy needed. I’m angry too, and really just miss my student”
Carole:
“Do you remember a teacher at a certain boys school who virtually did the same thing, was fired by the principal and reinstated by the dear Ministry of Education???
As regards your student, is lucky ‘im lucky ‘im neva get liks inna ‘im ‘an miggle!”
Zahra:
“Forgot about that. One of the teachers at school who’d threatened to have my students caned last term (I had to intervene to stop it), was – for a number of reasons – to face the Board and hopefully not come back. He has very much returned.
My ‘son’ once came to class last term saying it was hard to write – the VP had caned him on his knuckles.
School = prison indeed.”
Thanks for sharing you musings and family mail, Marguerite.
I was invited to St. Jago’s Annual Past Students Awards Dinner recently and the principal replied to the previous year’s awardee’s admonition of the deplorable state of the school. One of the examples given was the absence of windows. In the principal’s reply, supported by a slide presentation, one of the points to which he spoke was the fact that the school had in fact bought more that the required panes of glass for the windows to complete the refurbishing job but the amount was depleted before the job was complete (he alluded to theft). As a result, the classrooms now decidedly have a half wall topped by decorative blocks on the outside, and a half wall with an open space above on the opposite side facing the inside of the school.
Marguerite, I appreciate all that you say but after my experience at St. George’s I see another side, where the school (the teachers, the rules, the system, the facilities) are all, or for the most part, in response to the deprivation out there in society which is reflected in the behaviours of the children who attend and too, of the teachers and staff who are in charge. After all that was put in place at St. George’s, Dr. Kennedy recognized that he now had to retrain teachers to operate differently from the wardens they used to have to be. That change is slow, long and hard. It reminds me of the fact that the majority of our police force was trained during a ten-year period where they were all-powerful and therefore knew no other way, even after the Act was disbanded. (I have forgotten the name of the Act that allowed them to be brutal.)
It is a change in the entire society that we need. Sometimes I feel we need a zero tolerance government/modus operandi for about 10 years, maybe fascist – where the music, the dress, the dance, the behaviours are guided by new laws, where the consequences are meted out in a constructive manner, and then we have a 10 year period where we slowly lift these laws.
Keep writing. You do it well.
Much love.
Mich.
Thanks for reminding that Jamaica, in some areas of our national life are still living in the 19th century! This is one. I read an article just a week or so ago on the diary of one white slave overseer and I nearly threw up!Some of what I am seeing and hearing sounds like a watered down version but how do we start correcting this? I don’t have any answers. I don’t think any special person or group is to be blamed. It is just the system which has to be changed and I leave it to you who have the vision to start the revolution.
But in the meantime – what happened to that little word L-O-V-E? I am sure all those who administer these punishments are good Christian Church going ladies and gentlemen. Well my Bible (which I think they use too) tells me to love my neighbour as myself, so if I am truly doing that: every lick or punishment they administer to a child they should administer to themselves – that is truly loving our neighbour and sharing their pain!
This thought touched me in your musing about school as prison. Those thoughts took me back to Sparrow’s song. The one about the nursery rhymes that you learn in school and which programme you in “the direction” and gets you in the box. One area that really bothers me is that in many of the schools, we have moved from corporal punishment to a sort of mental punishment where we impose stress on the poor young people. We know that the single exam at the end of the year was not ideal, so we created semesters. But having not found an ideal alternative for the exam, we still have them at the end of the semester. Then in the semester we have the infamous course work – case studies, projects, quizzes, tests, presentations – in all the courses. If students submit the projects late, some people hit the roof and deduct points or refuse to mark them, not recognizing that getting the project on time may just have created one more mad person – dead on time, but unstable like hell!. I’m all for meeting deadlines, but not kill dead deadlines. Then there is the matter of how you assess the students at the end of the semester. Do you give them any idea about the format of the exam, any notion of the topics to be covered, any ideas about how to prepare themselves for this 2 or 3 hours where they are going to analyse this and that and put their thoughts on paper under stressful conditions! Maybe, this could be one reason why some of us neither want to read or write after leaving school.
I have not found a reasonable alternative to exams either, but my thinking cap is on and the struggle is on as many of us still have the sergeant major approach to exams and many of us don’t even see the need to try to find an alternative. They have studied and understood the assessment theories and they are adhering to them! Oh well!
Anyway, got to get ready for ‘prison’!
Bless you and enjoy today . . .
Denise