Online Reporter
Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
YES, the headline above suggests that parents and guardians do everything possible to lay positive foundations for their charges’ brave new futures in a world riven by innumerable distractions that impinge on the lives of young people.
Stated otherwise students and other youths should not be neglected for them to grow into donkeys on horse race courses.
Elsewhere in our global village, and specifically in Britain, students are subjected to ‘equipment checks’ by their respective school authorities to ensure that instead of carrying smartphones in their satchels, for instance, which distract the students’ concentration in class by reducing their attention span, they carry well written novels which promote their reading culture as failure to do that leads to poor linguistic communication even at university level, according to a Zimbabwean teacher on holiday back home from the diaspora.
No comment could be obtained from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education on whether similar equipment checks were necessary back here at home to ensure that students bore well-written books to empower articulations in Zimbabwe’s official languages.
What is however, imperative, according to the Zimbabwean teacher mentioned above, is for thorough checking of visitors to schools to ensure that they do not bring for sale, to students, drugs and substances that have become a menace among Zimbabwean youths who abuse them, with some of them dropping out of school or engaging in criminal activities.
Which also raises the need for community leaders in various parts of the country to introduce projects for youths hooked to drugs and substance abuse in a bid to provide a brighter future for them.
According to a recent local radio report concerned community leaders somewhere in Masvingo province have introduced to youths previously hooked to drugs development projects which run with our Government’s mantra: ‘Ilizwe lakhiwa ngabanikazi balo/Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo/A country is built by its owners’.
Such positive action must be applauded as it complements the work of rehabilitation centres to which other youthful victims of drugs and substance abuse are sent.
Peter Tanyanyiwa