Parents, partners in education

Morris Mtisi
WHILE some school heads and directors, also known as private school owners demonstrate respect and honour to parents in the way they handle their children enrolled in their education institutions, a worrisome number of them are guilty of ill-treatment which literally passes for criminal negligence and in some cases villainous child abuse.

When parents secure places for their children in schools, they become active partners in the education institutions, and not idle observers or sleeping partners. Having a child or children at a school makes every parent or guardian a client whose child deserves the best in care and education.

Of course some pupils’ or students’ standards of social and moral behavior leave a lot to be desired and true most of them need firm corrective measures to build them. But that even, is not an excuse for executive abuse. Schools are also moral or behavioural rearmament institutions-that, they are supposed to be, over and above being centres of academic equilibrium and other mental and vocational skills development. That then of course makes schools legitimate behavioural correctional institutions too. But this does not in any way justify the existence of typical martial ‘law’ evident in some schools countrywide. This writer, and please note, it’s a personal opinion, not a view of The Manica Post, condones friendly canning or correctional spanking, true some imps found in these schools deserve a little knock on the head or shambok-massage on the buttocks. We are not African by mistake and the stick has been a traditional treatment for misbehavior for ages. Those ‘healed’ by the stick include even most of our African presidents and leaders in Africa, I dare say. But for Heaven’s sake, correctional rehab must never translate into brutal, savage physical carnage. You don’t kill students in the name of correcting them.

Yes, some students exhibit forms of behavior that warrant tough verbal reprimand but what do some administration members of staff, senior teachers and school heads do? They unleash verbal venom on students and demonize even their mothers or fathers for who or what they are. If a student misbehaves, and many will do, where do the parents come into the equation? “Go tell your mom or dad to go to hell for all I care?” Really? At a school? In this century? Is that language used by a teacher or administrator in whom the parent or guardian entrusted his or her child? As if we don’t know that physical injuries heal faster than verbal injuries! School heads and administrators, teachers, must know better, mustn’t they? The verbal scar lives with the student long after school life is over. Is that a legacy schools, teachers and individual administrators want to leave on the minds of their products?

All institutions of learning, especially boarding schools, whether government or private owned, must have functioning health care facilities. This means employing ‘nurses’ with motherly, indeed fatherly love and care, but above all with basic knowledge of home or primary care nursing. Yet what do we see in some schools? Heartless brutes with no loving care and no knowledge of the medical treatment of the simplest conditions! Instead of attending to students’ health complaints, they harass sick students or give them poor attention which includes refusing them permission to visit their special doctor.

The press is awash with news about student ill treatment. We hear these issues every day. We have these stories in our files, well investigated and substantiated. We investigate and establish enough evidence, but listen! This writer for example, being a former school teacher himself has an emotional attachment to students wherever they are found. I personally detest students’ ill-treatment by schools as much as I detest their misbehavior at school. We sit on such stories of student abuse because of the respect and honour we give to schools and school heads. This particular writer is a guest writer and columnist on educational material only, please note, and exposing rot in schools is not his favourite news report. Therefore it is clearly not prudent for schools to ‘force’ the media to open Pandora’s boxes lying in their office closets. It is clearly not necessary. And letting sleeping dogs lie is not the same as fear or favour. We are human and often expect common sense to prevail before press freedom is exercised.