Garcia: Indiscipline in schools down

Anthony Garcia
Anthony Garcia

Indiscipline and violence are on the downside in schools, schools have to focus more on teaching instead of testing, and schools’ principals have to follow the Ministry of Education’s directives says Education Minister Anthony Garcia.

Garcia yesterday challenged school supervisors at a ceremony for eight newly-appointed school supervisors, held at the ministry’s St Vincent Street headquarters, to ensure they make the right changes on those issues.

On teaching and indiscipline, he said, when he took office in 2015, he would receive “piles and piles of requests for extended suspension.”

When students, who were mainly from forms three and four, had to write their reports, he said, “They could hardly string two words together to form a sentence and, in some cases, they had difficulty putting together letters to form a word.”

A child spending seven years in primary school and on leaving not being able to write properly, he said, is a serious indictment on our education system. It means that too many of our children are short-changed. We have not been doing sufficient teaching.”

The piles that come for suspension, he said, are now “few and far and in between” which tells him that “the incidence of indiscipline and violence in our schools have been on the down slide.”

It seems, the national community, he said, “has not gotten that message or some people deliberately continue to feed the view that there is this widespread indiscipline in schools which is not so.”

If two children fight in a school, he said, “It is carried on social media and the Express, Guardian, Newsday and television carry it as though it is this big calamity.”

Using himself as an example, he said, as a secondary school student he liked fighting.

“In growing up, boys in particular have to fight as a means to establishing themselves,” he said.

“It is a part of life, a part of growing up. But the media seems to be sensationalising this whole thing as if it is a big scourge on our education system.” Schools supervisors, he said, “have to assist us in changing that conversation.”

On the issue of principals not following directives, Garcia told the supervisors to acquaint themselves with the ministry’s circulars. Parents having to line up outside of a primary school before dawn to give them a chance to have their child admitted to that school, he said, “to me is one of the greatest injustices that could be placed on the shoulders of parents.”

The chief education officer has repeatedly sent out a circular advising principals on the admission of children to schools. Last year, he intervened at St Catherine’s Girls Anglican School, he said, after the acting CEO at the time brought to his attention that of hundreds of parents were lining up outside the school during the early hours of the morning.

“That has to stop. It is inhumane to have our parents having to stay there since 2 o’clock in the morning just to get a form,” he said.

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