One juvenile stabs another. A senior student lays into a junior – with a piece of iron. A group of schoolchildren throw (Bajans like to say “pelt”) stones at another group on the “public road”.
And when, in response to this or that happening, many in the general populace seem to be suffering palpitations, some, mostly men, say: “I don’t understand what all the fuss is about – this thing bin going on for years.”
Come again! Lots of things have been going on for years, but it is the frequency, the intensity and the audacity that make some things troubling. You could get shot in Barbados in the 1950s, but shooting was not happening virtually every day, several times a day, in front of many people, and with highly sophisticated firearms.
If you think it is the same thing, you are suffering from above-the-necktile dysfunction – the appropriate Viagra or Cialis equivalent will help you to have a firmer understanding. And when the moment comes, your head will be ready.
Anyway, something that last Thursday’s DAILY NATION quoted Cynthia Forde as saying in the House of Assembly last week caught my attention: “If children are committing crimes in homes, the communities and the schools, and we just [suspend them] . . . and they go back in the same environment . . . and are nurtured by the same guineagogs, some people in the community who push not only our boys but our girls into a lot of negative behaviour, what happens to them?”
If “guineagogs” are having a field day, how can we turn the tide?
Many recommendations have been made, but I want to look at one that does not come up in our discussions.
I can’t think of anything that is more important in our journey as human beings than understanding ourselves, understanding others and learning how to appropriately navigate our interactions with fellow humans.
How much is school doing to help youngsters truly face themselves and their role as fellow travellers on the road of human life?
If the teaching institution for the young – school – gives them little chance to look at themselves, to reflect on themselves, it is probably easy for them to listen to “guineagogs”, and be fed a dangerous view of others.
Take the teaching of writing.
Human history and the findings of science have informed us that writing is fundamentally an outpouring of the self and a frame for connection to others. It is not for nothing that writing has been found to be one of the most therapeutic means known to man.
But what do we ask children to write? Much of what we demand and expect has to do with genre writing. Narrative. Argument. Description. Exposition. And in truth, these are the general forms that writing takes. But in school they are not engaged in with a clear connection to real life; they are entered into as academic requirements.
So little Johnny produces a strained effort, which the teacher peruses with an eye on spelling and grammar and such. The self is thrown aside. What an introduction to self-expression! – in the one “subject” in which life and schoolwork could connect elementally, even intimately, right then and there.
Writing, which can afford some privacy – which is sometimes necessary – is not used for the important ends of exploring self and others, but almost exclusively for supposed academic and utilitarian purposes.
Hence children’s emotional intelligence suffers. Their sense of connection, too. So this involvement, which lends itself to thoughtfulness, organised thinking, and is more amenable to preservation (which is so valuable in re-examination) significantly short-changes the young in the school context.
Perhaps it is a carryover from how we engage them in talk.
It seems like we can’t wait to get the young to talk about societal “issues” – luring them into wet-behind-the-ears pontifications. And they have not even explored themselves! The talk that they are enticed into is not what is actually on their plate – teen relationships, values, communication, peer pressure, goal setting, sexuality, disenchantment, depression, trying to fit in. Their real lives. Their connections to others. Things that truly pull in their hearts and souls.
In the register of their school lives, these things are largely marked absent.
I suppose it goes with the territory. I have long lamented the fact that Barbadians – possibly all Caribbean people – hardly talk about their own nitty-gritty experiences. Our souls are not in the communal conversation. Rationalistic and editorialising, we have driven the experiential underground, except in our mostly anonymous romance-related cries to Christine or Madam Solutions or “Cupid”.
And when positive experiential “company” is in short supply, we often seek solace in the wrong activities and in the wrong people, “guineagogs” included.
And why not “guineagogs” for our schoolchildren, when in their school writing and talking they are not really connecting with anybody, least of all themselves? They are writing and talking simply as part of an “academic” journey.
So discovery is of everything but themselves and the daily practice is centred on skills, knowledge and, often, ideas – with little focus on individuals’ emotional and interactional development.
A changed focus for school writing (and talk) is not a panacea. But we need all the help we can get.