Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us . . . . Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing. – Marianne Williamson, author, lecturer and spiritual leader.
On the surface, it seems exceedingly strange marrying ill-discipline with a love for material things. But Coleridge and Parry principal Vincent Fergusson swears, as far as disruptive school students are concerned, the conjoining is by no means far-fetched.
Mr Fergusson told the SUNDAY?SUN in yesterday’s Big Interview that once upon a time his school was for northern country boys, “whose outlook was different from that of those [boys] from Bridgetown and the Greater Bridgetown areas”. Now, he seemed to lament, “quite a few” of this type of student outside the north country were being bussed to the school.
In many instances, said the St Peter school head, these students were the ones who involved themselves in “aggressive activity”, or vandalism, or “guile in making other individuals’ property [theirs]”.
And according to Mr Fergusson, the problem had become worse because of the greater influx today. He argued that there was “a significant difference” between the outlook of the products of rural Barbados and those of urban.
For the non-rural student, he said, there was a more “material approach” to life; the pupil of the rural districts tended “to suffer more for what you want”. Read that to mean the student was patient, not given to instant gratification, and was willing to spend time – and practise diligence – working more toward quality goals.
Said Mr Fergusson: “To me, it is even more glaring now; these [from the urban corridor] are the students who give the most trouble when it comes to ill-discipline” – because they are material-minded.
The social scientist might reasonably charge Mr Fergusson with profiling, but the principal insists that this is the reality.
We are not sure that today there is this great divide between urban and rural children as far as amenities and access to modernity in the cellphone, laptop and personal LCD TV go. So, the misconduct of the non-rural student may have root elsewhere.
Mr Fergusson says students have been travelling from as far away as Silver Sands in Christ Church to class in St Peter. Why? A pupil made to travel this far and back every day must be irritable.
It is a reflection on the school system when a child in the south must trek daily to the uttermost of the north – which brings us to the challenge of placement in our secondary schools; but that is another topic.
For all the material things that we might gift our pupils, it will not be this we are mostly remembered for, but for the cherishing and sensitiveness we afforded them.
