Three incidents in the last six days indicate the extreme danger and trauma faced by children in T&T, both inside and outside of the classroom.
Last Friday, a 16-year-old Form Five student of the Signal Hill Secondary School was stabbed and beaten during a brawl involving at least four students in a classroom. Given the ferocity of the blows exchanged, the young men involved could easily have ended up in the morgue, rather than the hospital.
On Monday, a 14-year-old St Mary’s College student is reported to have been stabbed three times with a screwdriver by an older student in a dispute over a vaping device. The assailant in that matter is reported to have run out of the school and up to late yesterday was still at large.
And then, on Tuesday, all of the pupils attending the Gloster Lodge Moravian Primary School in Belmont were shocked and probably scarred for life when a 50-year-old man was gunned down in the road outside the school.
It is clear that the violence inside the nation’s schools—and sometimes right outside the front gates of educational institutions—has reached a tipping point.
The time has passed for ministers and secretaries of education to be issuing statements, or making speeches, about young people being fostered in cultures of violence and being “utterly appalled and deeply grieved” by the violence in the nation’s classrooms.
It is clear that the fighting students of Signal Hill and St Mary’s College have not got the message that involvement in acts of violence in classrooms can result in life-changing consequences.
And that may be because while the Government may have decided that students under the age of 16, who are expelled from the school system, should be enrolled in the Military-Led Academic Training Programme (MiLAT), no attempt has been made to publicise the difference between that institution and secondary schools.
The Government needs to ramp up both the rhetoric and the actions needed to bring T&T’s schools back from the brink of open disobedience and students threatening teachers and each other.
In its messaging, the Government needs to place focus on the fact that MiLAT is not a hotel, from which these miscreants can come and go as they please. In its actions, the Government should give serious consideration to making school-based violence a criminal offence.
And as has been outlined in this space on a number of occasions, parents and guardians have a responsibility to ensure that their school-aged children are maximising their future potential by focusing on learning and not violence in the classroom.
Far too often, children who fight in schools—whether they are expelled or not—graduate to joining the country’s urban criminal gangs, who are waging a vicious and murderous battle to take charge of T&T’s drug blocks and gun trade.
Parents and guardians of troubled children need to emphasise to their charges, over and over again, that education is the means of social mobility that has worked for generations of Caribbean people. And that gang membership, according to Thomas Hobbs, often leads to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”