LAST week, I related the response of a group of pupils from a high school in Larnaca to their parents’ alarm at the possibility of a drugs therapy unit opening a kilometre away from their school.
The pupils brought their parents tumbling from the pulpits of bourgeois rectitude and propriety from which they chose to preach, and landed them solidly in the everyday reality of schools today. They also made a moving plea for understanding, love and support.
Recent incidents of violence in schools also raised a lot of comment from various quarters, but the argument always seemed to be about whether the pupils or the teachers were to blame. No-one seems to have posed the question of quite why schools today are such violent places. I certainly experienced this during my short but highly instructive stint as a high-school Physics teacher, as well as during my own school years a decade and a half ago.
It’s a fact that schools today are fundamentally violent places. The violence is perpetrated on pupils, parents, and teachers alike, and all parties are equally to blame for doing nothing about it. The teachers in private schools are too frightened of losing their jobs to do anything. The teachers of government schools are ruled by trade unions which regularly raise hell over minor points of remuneration and promotion, but never seem to bother about the real, substantial, painful issues.
The mandarins in the Ministry of Education seem to inhabit a different planet, descending to Earth only in order to exercise their own brand of wanton violence, in the form, for but one example, of arbitrary changes to final exam syllabuses and University entrance requirements mere months before the end of a cycle for which pupils make their choices more than two years in advance.
Most parents are pathologically anxious about their offspring securing the highest
examination placings, to the total exclusion of everything else. And the pupils react either by buying into the ideology of maximum exam grades, demanding of their teachers the kind of mind-numbing teaching by rote and memorisation that they should normally have been the first
to rebel against, or by adopting a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ delinquent attitude.
When I was teaching, I saw intelligent young people, who should have been full of curiosity and lust for life, scurry about with backs bent and eyes empty, full of anxiety and fear. I saw others become indifferent, unreceptive, rude and violent.
Before one chooses to castigate today’s pupils for their unruliness, one should ask instead: what kind of school teaches pupils Newton’s Laws of Mechanics and tells them nothing about things that matter a great deal to themselves personally, such as their own sexual, emotional, and social development? What kind of school system forces image-conscious teenagers to wear a silly uniform that makes them look like a cross between a low-ranking civil servant and a waiter in a second-rate restaurant? What kind of school teaches young people to memorise and quote the ‘right answers’ rather than think and deduce?
Nothing about the school environment promises young people excitement, joy and fulfilment. They are not called to share the richness of learning, the thrill of discovery. Instead, they are summoned to join the joyless rat race for the good grades which will secure the equally joyless good job with a bank or the government. Is it any wonder that those who buy into the ideology become stress cases, while those who understandably don’t, become delinquents? Is it any wonder that many of them seek the fulfilment and excitement they crave, and which they certainly can’t find in their school environment, in ‘night life’, in casual sex, in tobacco and alcohol, in drugs, violence and petty crime?
Is it any wonder that the society which has set up this school system reaps the rewards in the suffocating grey mediocrity which smothers it, and in the delinquency which ravages it at all levels? The next time you encounter a person in a key position who seems totally devoid of judgment, initiative and imagination, ask yourself: was he or she not the star pupil of his or her year, the one who best played the game of memorising the ‘right answers’ authority provided? The
next time you hear about delinquency at any level, from schoolboys to government Ministers and Members of Parliament, ask yourself: where it was they learnt that the end of having your own way justifies the means, however damaging to themselves and those around them.
Physics problems for marking and report cards for grading to: [email protected]
Crazy Man from the Door
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
