You are no longer the minister, Gopeesingh

THE EDITOR: I am fed up of Dr Tim Gopeesingh and his nostalgia. So congratulations for all the systems that he boasts were put in place by his government. But if they were really so effective, what has happened?

Did the thousands of teachers who Gopeesingh claims were trained in alternative dispute resolution and mediation all retire from the service? Because by common logic, unless all the teachers trained were 55 years and over at the time, the majority would still be in the school system doing a mighty job of handling those disputes which could lead to violence.

And what about the more than 20,000 parents who were taught how to parent their children in those more than 300 workshops? Are they no longer parents? Probably their children are all grown now or are we to assume that they no longer use the skills they would have learnt four and a half years ago on the children they still have?

I am fed up of Gopeesingh and his inability to grasp that he is no longer the minister of education. I understand that he really believes he was the best thing that happened to education – but he wasn’t.

I am fed up of Gopeesingh and his exaggerated sense of accomplishment accompanied by his sense of faulty logic. With a 23-point plan put in place as described by him, our schools today should not have any problems of indiscipline and violence. The truth is that our schools are a reflection of our society and students copy the adults and think they can get away with wrongdoing too.

Gopeesingh speaks about zero tolerance as if it’s a term he invented. It is because there is a zero tolerance approach to violence and indiscipline in the schools that students prone to violent acts are removed from the schools and treated elsewhere. The Education Ministry under the present ministers takes its responsibility to every child seriously, enough to make provisions even for the misguided ones.

I am fed up of Gopeesingh and his inability to understand that many of the acts of violence that we see on social media today are posts that are a few years old – some may be even from the time the goodly doctor is so nostalgic about.

The bottom line is that there is violence everywhere in TT and that will be reflected in our schools. There is no magic wand here.

It’s more than time that Gopeesingh realises that he is no longer the education minister. It is 2020, Anthony Garcia is the Minister of Education and he is doing a darn good job without the funds that Gopeesingh’s government had at its disposal. Hmm…wonder where all that went?

SAFFIYA KHAN

retired educator

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"You are no longer the minister, Gopeesingh"

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