CONCERTED AND CONSULTATIVE EFFORTS NEEDED IN CURBING RISING STUDENT INDISCIPLINE.

Anyone in close contact with teachers knows that creating discipline and order in school is vital to teachers’ success. Unfortunately, curbing indiscipline in our schools is an extremely complex and difficult task. This difficulty arises out of the realization that other stakeholders have left this task in the hands of teachers alone. Worse still, some of them are working at cross purposes with teachers.

Buoyed up by the negligence and lackadaisical attitudes from these stakeholders, recalcitrant students see rigid or mechanistic school rules and regulations as attempts to curb their freedom. They therefore increasingly challenge and erode the teachers` authority. The consequence of this erosion has been terrible.

Many schools that were hitherto centers for academic excellence, character building and the dissemination of positive values have become relics and sites for gross indiscipline. Incidences of student strikes leading to senseless deaths and damage to property worth millions of shillings have become the order of the day.

Amid the chatter about the rising indiscipline in schools, the ministry of basic education is busy putting in place stringent student protectionist policies. These boardroom policies have succeeded in making the teacher the victim of circumstances. Such policies include empowering students to police teachers, forcing school administrators to establish roguish student councils and outlawing of corporal punishment without its effective replacement.

At this formative age, too much student freedom is synonymous to planting hybrid seeds in unhealthy soils. In other words, while it is not wrong to import solutions for discipline management from foreign cultures we must not forget that even though human beings throughout the world have essentially the same psychological structure; their cultures tend to make them different. We must therefore take care that in our quest to look “modern” we do not allow features of foreign culture to prevent teachers from maintaining sound, firm and appropriate action plans for curbing indiscipline in our schools. It is in fact touted that many school administrators are so scared of students that they would rather talk tough to teachers than students.

Unfortunately, whenever issues of gross indiscipline manifest themselves through such macabre acts as arson, parents unflinchingly indict teachers in their entirety. Interestingly, the basic education ministry has a penchant for lambasting teachers yet so many reports on indiscipline in schools are gathering dust on its shelves.
I think it is a high time that the government and the society at large stopped behaving like the proverbial ostrich. We need concerted and consultative efforts in curbing indiscipline in our schools.

Experience has taught us albeit the hard way that one cannot merely give instruction to disruptive, unruly and criminal elements in our schools on how to behave in socially acceptable ways. If that were the case, then, we should also be seeing our courts of law discarding the penal code and resorting to tutoring criminals on how to reform in the absence of corporal punishment. Common sense dictates that student indiscipline can be overcome by the well-known, time-tested principles of the rod alongside guiding and counseling strategies. Complicated, new-fangled boardroom policies are not needed.

Last but not least, parents must not become rooted in denial of their children`s misbehavior. Unfortunately many of them deliberately take sides with their children. Some of them have even initiated litigation against teachers for instituting disciplinary measures against their children. Society should know that teachers like all other human beings are risk averse. They too have a limit in terms of the pressure that they can handle. Beyond a certain level, stress takes toll on them. As a matter of fact, the colossal hostility and distrust from parents and the ministry of education has immensely contributed to teacher stress and burnout making many of them dysfunctional. In fact, barring a radical transformation in combating student indiscipline, I can hazard to predict a looming disaster for the basic education sector in the country.

TOME FRANCIS,
BUMULA.
http://twitter.com/tomefrancis