MY?MOTHER used to tell me day in, day out that crime doesn’t pay.
I don’t know if she saw some proclivity in me to be a criminal or not; she never said, God bless her soul.
But her persistent counselling kept me on the straight and narrow.
I won’t be presumptuous enough to claim that my success had anything to do with being a paragon of virtue; I would settle for the fear of being caught, driven in me by my mum.
When you add to that the echoing of said counsel by St Barnabas/Pine Primary School headmaster Kyle Inniss and his deputy Mr Cummins, I certainly had to walk on the right side of the road for another fear: that of the thick leather strap of correction.
I am not complaining. If you feared the strap long enough not to do the wrong things, by the time you became a grown man you got into the habit of doing right.
Let’s face facts: it is a thrill to do wrong as a child and get away with it. Put the blackboard duster in the teacher’s chair so he sits on it and whitens his seat. Supplant the duster with drawing pins. Ouch!
Draw teacher into a dogfight from the back – or by ear – with a paper jet plane while he is preparing transcription on the board for copying.
Use the space between blackboard and teacher’s backing head as a hoop for shooting a miniature paper basketball.
It is a thrill; but not a proper thing, and certainly not a responsible one.
Truth be told, getting away with such skulduggery was seldom. Not that I ever participated. But sometimes that did not matter. The entire class would get the strap – that made for firmer vertebrae and an unwritten code to watch each other’s back – when the guilty wouldn’t own up and the rest of us wouldn’t snitch.
I can tell you Mr Inniss carried a strong arm; Mr Cummins a healthier one yet.
And it didn’t make any point complaining to Mother. Just like Freundel Stuart’s mum would have, I believe, she would take you by hand back to headteacher Inniss for more. And Mr Cummins would be there waiting in the wings.
The fear of God and teacher was a religion back then.
Those of us in Prime Minister Stuart’s age group, more than most, have been convinced that crime doesn’t pay, that cheating is an exercise in futility.
And I am not into womanising on this one. God knows, Solomon has regaled us enough with this “vanity and vexation of spirit”.
I talk about simple cheating. Cheating in exams. Cheating in and on the job.
Nowadays, cheating is a stepping stone to success: to a good grade; to a promotion; to power. You can spot the cheats: the student who gets an A plus in English but can’t spell past the exam; the worker who wiggles himself into a managerial post but can’t deliver either the job or the instructions on doing the job; the person who claims power but is so intoxicated by it that all he is able to do is walk about with a smile fashioned by a crash between a minibus and Banks beer truck.
The absence or infrequency of the use of the strap in recent years may be behind the apparent numbness we feel about cheating, and the erosion of ethics everywhere. My honourable friend and a mentor Carl Moore won’t agree; to him the strap is an anathema. But not sparing the rod has hardly ever spoiled the child.
When from school days nothing has been out of bounds in the pursuit of success, we create techies who steal exam info, journalists who fabricate quotes, business people who cook the books, sportspersons who zoom on steroids.
It becomes tragic when “maximising our potential” begins to blur the line between right and wrong.
