IF YOU EXPECTED this establishment to show any sympathy for the spoiled brats we call students then read no further. If on the other hand, like us, you are fed up of listening to self-regarding, spotty-faced 15- and 16-year-olds, giving lectures on the television and radio news about what is wrong with schools and how the appalling behaviour of their class-mates is the fault of teachers, parents, the government, media and hoteliers, read on.
It was almost surreal how the TV news led with comments made by teenagers about the hooligan behaviour in Paphos. Some carried five-minute interviews with inarticulate teenagers because they were the President of some Mickey Mouse student organisation. I can understand getting a couple of remarks from a kid at the end of a news report, but making their views the lead news story beggars belief. Don’t news editors understand that these are just kids?
I know that the views expressed by a lot of politicians and given prominence on the news are often more idiotic than what we heard from the kids, but I still think that kids should stick to fighting in the streets and causing damage to cars and shop windows than playing the media analysts. And if the politicians emulated the kids and indulged in a little anti-social behaviour as well, instead of uttering nonsense on TV, this would be a much happier society.
Ten days ago, one TV station carried a five-minute interview with a student who had assaulted the deputy headmaster, to the cheers of the other kids, after the latter had expelled him for gross indiscipline. The student was allowed to tell us that he had done nothing wrong, of course, and that it was the deputy head who had assaulted him first by grabbing his arm and pushing him around.
He was only defending himself by putting the teacher on the ground and hitting him, he claimed, also insisting that his expulsion was unfair and unjust. Is it social progress to allow teenagers to lie about their behaviour on television? Surely this is the prerogative of the president and the politicians and should not be compromised.
THE INSANITY at the schools is a direct result of the absurd democratisation of education that our clueless Education Minister Pefkios Georgiades has tried to introduce. As part of this democratisation drive, teenage students and their equally clueless parents are allowed to sit on the committee that will proposed what reforms would be made to the education system.
Because Pefkios cannot be bothered to come up with ideas of how to reform the education system he has asked teachers, parents and students to make suggestions. So if we end up with schools that have two-hour breaks, no homework and allow cheating in exams we should not really be surprised. This is what I would suggest if as a student I was asked to make suggestions to reform the education system.
But the democratic rights of the kids do not end there. The Education Ministry has already presented a new evaluation system for teachers which will have the kids and their parents grading the performance of each teacher. Promotion of a teacher will depend partly on the marks he or she gets for performance from parents and kids.
To underline his commitment to democracy in education, Pefkios and ministry mandarins have been involved in three months of discussions with school kids over the thorny issue of uniforms. Predictably, no decision was reached because the kids kept vetoing the ministry’s proposals. In the end, the ultra-democratic Pefkios was so fed up that he washed his hands of the situation, announcing 10 days ago that each individual school would set its own uniform rules.
WHEN YOU treat kids like adults, tell them they have democratic rights and are allowed to grade their teachers’ performance, it is inevitable that the teenager will think that they are the equals, if not the betters, of their teachers. So if a teacher tells a teenager off, he believes it is his democratic right to beat the teacher up and then claim he had been provoked. The expelled kid and his parents will most probably give the teacher a zero when they evaluate his performance.
Is it any surprise that a 12-year-old tried to sexually harass his female teacher at the Emba school? It was his democratic right to pinch his teacher’s bottom. At least this is what his parents believed and they have sued the school for mistreating their spoiled brat of a kid. The teacher had grabbed him by the arm and taken him to the head’s office where he was reprimanded and threatened with expulsion.
The teacher and head-teacher displayed “unprofessional or even illegal behaviour, while acting against the underage pupil”. The law suit also said: “The defendants, while carrying out their duties or invoking carrying out their duties, caused psychological or mental harm to the child, exceeding their duties as such.” The parents are demanding compensation from the school.
This is what constitutes democratic education. A teacher tells off a brat who grabbed her bum and she will be taken to court for causing the kid psychological harm. Bring back corporal punishment, I say, and administer it on parents, because they are more to blame for their kids’ bad behaviour than the kids themselves.
I WOULD give Pefkios a good hiding as well unless he told us his reasoning for giving students a say in the running of the schools and the education system. What is the logic of giving 14-year-olds with braces, who are primarily interestrf in the latest Playstation game, a say in school affairs? Kids under 18 are not considered mature enough to drive, to drink, to sign a contract, to vote, to go to the cabaret or buy a house but they are qualified enough to reform the education system and evaluate their teachers’ performance…
If the government were consistent and genuinely committed to democracy for teenagers then it should give them the right to vote as well. They will cause less harm to society by voting than having a say in education matters.
THE COMPANY which publishes Man, Must and several other glossy rags, held its annual Man of the Year awards bash at Nicosia’s Zoo nightclub last Monday. Man of the Year was the plantation’s tennis sensation Marcos Baghdatis who reached his first ATP final this year. Unfortunately, he could attend the ceremony to pick up his award.
There was a bit of a problem with the Businessman of the Year Award, which the selection committee had decided to award to the new Bank of Cyprus CEO, Andreas Eliades. However, Eliades a no-nonsense executive and one of the very few high-powered Cypriots who does not crave publicity, informed the organisers that he did not want their prestigious award. Nicos Shacolas, of Ermes fame, also informed them that he did not want to be a candidate.
The organisers were not too overjoyed with Eliades’ snub, as they had to find another Businessman of the Year. They chose Nicos Sarris, the chairman of the Evrika trading and manufacturing group for his company’s achievements in Cyprus and abroad.
By some coincidence, the organisers usually give their Businessman of the Year Award to someone running a company with a big advertising budget. Last year’s winner was the CEO of one of the biggest car dealerships, Charlambos Pilakoutas, which imports BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover and the Mini. The B of C has the biggest advertising budget of all, but this had nothing to do with choosing Eliades.
In the end, the organisers disproved the theory that the winners of the businessman category usually command a big advertising budget by giving the award to Sarris, who is not in the Pilakoutas, Shacolas or B of C league when it comes to advertising budgets. That he was not the first choice is beside the point.
LIMASSOL PORT has still to operate the x-ray machines for baggage that were installed more than a year ago and cost the taxpayer several hundred thousands of poun
ds. I refer to those machines that you put your hand luggage through at Larnaca airport with a cop, sitting at the side pretending he is checking what’s inside of them while picking his nose or chatting to a colleague.
It was decided that for security reasons similar machines should be installed at the ports. They were bought, installed, checked, cops were trained in their use, but a year later they have still not been turned on, nor has a cop been seen seated beside any of them.
The reason? According to the law, the X-ray machines can only be operated by cops, but there is an ongoing dispute between the Ports Authority and the Police Command over who will pay the cops to man the machines. Both sides argued they had not budgeted for the cops’ pay and the machines have been switched off, gathering dust for a year. For all we know, terrorists could have passed nuclear devices, bombs and machine guns, through Limassol port.
Just love the way officials think. They had the X-ray machines but the Port Authority could not be bothered to put its own staff to carry out the checks on luggage because, according to the law, only cops can perform this duty. But they were perfectly happy to ignore the law by which security checks of luggage has to be carried out at ports, for a whole year.
THEY COULD train Customs officials to operate the X-ray machines at the port as they have very little work to do since EU accession. Despite accession and most cargo at Larnaca airport arriving from EU countries, the same number of customs officers are still employed there with very little to do. They can occasionally carry out random checks on cargo but this is not enough work to keep them busy for longer than a few hours a week.
To justify their salaries and parasitic existence, they just offer great nuisance value to businesses waiting to pick up cargo, delaying them for no reason, taking forever to sign their documents, carrying out unnecessary inspections and other such meaningless activities, which greatly contribute to the creation of national wealth.
They still resort to the popular old scam – when they can – of refusing to give clearance for products during office hours and forcing the recipient to pay them overtime to issue clearance papers in the afternoon. Only last week, a company was made to wait three hours to collect parcels from Customs at Larnaca Airport so it would have to pay a respectable overtime charge. Nice to know that EU membership has left this officially-sanctioned protection rackets intact; as the union like to remind us the acquired rights of workers are not negotiable.
OUR GOVERNMENT may have given full democratic rights to school-kids, allowing them to mouth off their views to the minister and on telly, but it rarely shows such a commitment to free speech when the DISY Fuhrer Nice Nik says something. This week the Ethnarch took an excerpt of Nik’s comments out of context and used it to present him as a traitor who wanted the partition of the island.
His example was faithfully followed by all his government allies (Christofias, Omirou, Cleanthous, Perdikis, Goldenmouth), who took turns to express outrage at the allegedly unpatriotic sentiments expressed by the hapless Fuhrer. What had he said? He wondered “how is it possible to create or encourage procedures that will lead to a settlement, if our aim is to stay in the presidency of the current Republic of Cyprus, the boundaries of which extend only to the Green Line and the Ledra Palace”.
A perfectly legitimate point – made after DIKO’s deputy leader Nik Cleanthous let it slip that the Ethnarch was looking for a second presidential term – was taken out of context, distorted and used to attack the Fuhrer. Fascist regimes engage in such practices, but not countries that give democratic right to teenagers.
The Ethnarch immediately took the moral high ground, censoring the man “who accepts that there are boundaries in Cyprus and those boundaries are the Green Line”. The other politicians were even more disparaging, accusing Nik of being a champion of partition.
In the plantation of the Ethnarch, the only truth that exists is that spoken by Him. In practical terms, he has done more than anyone to bring partition closer, but the Fuhrer is to blame for mentioning it as a possibility.
GOVERNMENT moraliser, Cyprus Goldenmouth had a very original take on this. “The correct policy would be for DISY to accept that a verbal error was committed, issue a mea culpa and admit to citizens that nobody should use such phrases or characterisations”. Perhaps Nik should go outside the palazzo and start whipping himself, and chanting ‘I repent, I repent, please forgive me, kind and generous Ethnarch.” This would satisfy the morally irreproachable Goldenmouth.
This from a guy, whose main job is to tell us that the Ethnarch did not mean what he said, and who is forever trying to re-interpret the verbal slips and occasional untruths uttered by his boss. How often has the Ethnarch issued a mea culpa after telling us that there would be a new peace initiative only for his claim to be rubbished by the UN? Not once, but then again he is the Ethnarch and when he makes verbal slips he is motivated by patriotism, in stark contrast to Nik.
WOULD your believe the Ethnarch’s claim that he is not interested in a second presidential term? If he is not why does he have a highly-paid communications consultant coming from Greece every week to advise him what to say, what policies to pursue and when to attack the Fuhrer? A man who was not interested in a second term would not need the services of a communications advisor, whose brief is to sell his customer to the electorate.
CHERIE BLAIR, we read is defending the Orams couple, the British man and wife who have built their home on Greek Cypriot land in the north. This would not be the first time that Tony has been embarrassed by his wife’s business activities. The question is who is paying Cherie’s fees? There is no way the Orams could be footing the bill. Could the money have come from the ‘TRNC’? That would be a bit of a shocker – British PM’s wife in the pay of Talat.
