adminStories by Morris Mtisi
THE purpose of this write-up is to call the two ministries of education to address moral decay in the schools as a matter of urgency. I have decided to relieve the PED for this week from the scintillating weekly debate, Head-to- Head With MM. Allow me to attend to what I believe is a very crucial subject and topic: THE SINFUL CELEBRATION OF MORAL DECAY IN EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS.
High schools, private and public colleges and universities have become incubation centres of moral decay in Zimbabwe. And society continues to watch and conduct its business as usual. The ministries of education continue to watch the racing horses galloping to the finishing lines, ignoring the damage they are doing to the turf. Ignoring? Perhaps not quite, but failing to find tangible solutions to the question of school based moral decay.
Saturday-21 November 2015 was a public exhibition of school leavers’ debauchery in Mutare. Hundreds of teenage boys and girls just completed their Form 4 and 6 final examinations converged at a popular club north of the city of Mutare to drink, smoke pot, take drugs and indulge in public sex orgies reminiscent of the filthy Harare students’ nude parties which continue to go viral on social media.
That Saturday, the whole day, young roughnecks, both boys and girls dressed in revealing fashion, belt-high skirts, bootleg shorts, skin tights, crop-up leggings and shamefully diaphanous apparel of sorts jam-packed the northern city club to celebrate Lucifer who led the python, the python who led Eve and Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. Later on the drunken young sex maniacs spilled over the Murambi low-density suburb in daylight like hoodlums, celebrating in drink, smoke and sexual communions.
The popular social spot (name withheld) was for the rest of the day a hive of activity specialising in all of the sinning in the book and soon drunken boys and girls arm in arm, lip to lip, tongue to tongue flooded the suburb streets and roadside bushes busy eating the forbidden fruit. Every sane parent or adult would have painfully lamented this awful trend of moral decay.
What has become of our children there in the schools and after? That is the question? Who is to blame for such moral rot? Is it Satanism at work, coming with the face of fashion and trendiness?
In one of my engagements with the Provincial Education Director (PED)-Manicaland, Mr Edward Shumba recently, I asked him whether the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education’s call for Ubunthu/Hunhu in the schools is genuinely serious or simply pushing academic rhetoric and empty sloganeering. The PED unequivocally counter blamed society for children’s moral decay. He was right. But more right than that he asserted that moral rearmament was a collective responsibility. “The school can only play its part,” he said. I quickly charged head-to-head putting him on the spot. I insisted schools must play a greater part of shaping the behavior of students and pupils in ‘his’ schools. I too was right. Students spend ninety percent of their youthfulness at school, not at home, now do they not? It is the school and the school environment that shapes children more than anything else in their lives nowadays.
Yet what I saw in the plush Murambi suburb on that cool drizzly Saturday as I drove past with a friend, suddenly made me shift my perception of students’ moral decay and how it can be addressed. My friend and I were awfully shocked. If students or youths go beyond the red- line sin of ‘decent’ promiscuity and begin to think it is a sin that must be enjoyed publicly and collectively in daylight and in Harare for example in stark nakedness, surely it ceases to be a challenge school alone can address. Who knows? Maybe the nude parties are already taking part in Mutare. And may God forbid!
So while my good friend the PED was wrong, he was right. . . very right, to assert that moral rearmament was a collective responsibility. It is not at school where mad teenage boys and girls learn to see an awful lifestyle and behaviour as an awesome one. This insanity certainly goes beyond not just knowing the difference in meaning between ‘awful’ and ‘awesome’.
Shall society then continue to stand aside and look at our children grow and drown into demi-mondes of sexual gambling and drug taking clubs, becoming unashamed enfants-terribles in broad daylight?
Whatever and whoever is to blame or not, society or school, Satanism or Fanaticism, parents or peer pressure, the crisis is deep and slowly but fast growing into a social pandemic.
We cannot continue to send children to school, colleges and universities to study for the grave; to become learned idiots and national liabilities. We all talk about children as our future. What future can come from social misfits, drunks, drug addicts and daylight prostitutes? What window of hope can be guaranteed from such hopelessness? Too strong to say about school leavers or even those on holiday? You haven’t seen them. You haven’t seen anything yet.
The world today is coldly gripped by the fear of terrorist attacks in world capitals, Paris, Brussels Washington, London and many others. Peace is falling apart and things are no longer at ease everywhere in the world.
If in Zimbabwe we continue to be blind to the reality of in-school corruption and moral decay and continue to talk, talk, and talk without doing something, soon the behavioural rot shall deteriorate into a terrorist-size menace. Something or somebody is terrorizing the fabric of Zim-society, and its pillar, the children, is falling fast. If churches continue to preach and preach without doing something, soon children will be animals without any sense of self-control. Most of them already are.
These wayward young boys and girls fresh from school, who celebrate free sex and drug taking in broad daylight are not different from ‘suicide bombers’ who deliberately don’t fear or see anything wrong with blowing themselves up and those around them.
France, Belgium, Russia, Britain and America plus many other threatened nations have now stopped talking, hopefully not too late, and chosen to take direct action to stop what they have collectively seen and agreed to define as terrorism.
What are we doing as Ministries of Education, as government? As parents, as churches and as whoever and whatever we may be in society? What are we doing about children’s moral decay?
Here are a few suggestions: We cannot stop suggesting and speaking because no one listens. Schools remain cardinal in the responsibility of championing moral rearmament. They (schools) must design working behavioural change interventions; not in-school clubs but real tuition lessons treated as part and parcel of everyday subject content. Teach, discuss, debate issues of moral decay in class. Their Literature, in all languages, must be filled with moral rearmament set books to provide platform or literary platforms of debate and analysis. Remove useless stories from the literature students are meant to study. It is not time for irrelevant academic entertainment. The government must support new writers to spring up with stories intended to deal with the menace of in-school moral decay.
The school must provide an environment for responsible growth into adulthood through efficaciously designed classroom lessons. Schools must seriously bring back moral rearmament to the front burners. Scripture Union, with all due respect, led by habitual actors and actresses, pretenders and sex maniacs has failed to change the majority of hard-core imps in schools. Schools need proper lessons where classes participate in comment, analysis, debate and discussion led by serious behaviour-change teachers who are committed to championing this behavioral transformation. Most of these youth clubs operating in the schools for the students by the students have made behavioural matters worse. This is time to review certain perceptions of social development which give children too much space to become delinquent and behaviorally wayward.
Government must severely deal with delinquent behaviour, lock up culprits in corrective institutions until they are straight. Bring back corporal punishment guided by corrective, underline corrective, not brutal control measures. Arrest club or social hide-out owners who entertain school-leavers and allow them to buy alcohol, drink and be stupid at or with each other.
The most difficult challenge may be the question, ‘If parents, too many of them, are the black pots, how will they be able to teach the kettles to be white?’ Parents are a mirror of their children’s behavior, one school of thought says. This sounds very ridiculous to say. But when you carefully reflect that these demi-monde clubs are filled with students whose hellish-fashion attire was bought by their parents, the money they flash to lure stupid girls with and buy drugs or alcohol was given them by parents and even the cars driven without licenses to attract foolish over libidinous girls were not all stolen but given by permissive self-styled ‘English’ or ‘American’ parents, you cannot help but agree with the assertion that some parents are the number one culprits.
If Jesus Christ came back today and asked all responsible parents to submit one, only one crisis being their worst, many would spontaneously say, “Our children’s morality.” Those who think this is a storm in a teacup do not know what a storm is when they experience one.
The correct word to describe school-leavers’ behaviour is ‘awful’ not ‘awesome,’ tell the children. We cannot end this sad story without acknowledging that it is not all school-leavers who are awful, but indeed too many of them.
Online Reporter