Teachers need protection from children’s criminal tendencies

According to the Daily Nation (August 1, 2016), National Police Service Commission Chairman Johnston Kavuludi has ruled out “sending police officers to schools” in spite of the fact that the cause of the recent school fires still remains shrouded in mystery.

In the same newspaper, columnist Rasna Warah bemoans the widespread turmoil in the world “as youth are cut off from their communities”.

The debate on recent school fires still rages, with different theories being advanced, including: parental neglect, lack of guidance and counselling services, administrative incompetence, unpopular regulations, the breakdown of the moral fibre in society, and the prohibition of corporal punishment in schools, among others.

What is undebatable is that there is increasing criminality among schoolchildren (including those in colleges and universities).

As implied in Warah’s article, the problem is not limited to the Kenyan situation. In the developed world, there have been reports of children shooting their classmates dead.

As we ponder this problem, it must be understood that from the time children enter high school, they are only children legally but not biologically.

Indeed, by the time they get to university they have officially reached the age of adulthood.

In our traditional societies, teenagers form the bulk of the members of the warrior class.

Biologically and psychologically, this is the time of puberty and adolescence, the most difficult time in the physical and mental development of human beings.

In principle, it is the time when children are turning into adults. By that age they can make babies. A good percentage of our parents got married and had babies at that age.

Puberty and adolescence are trying moments for young people, especially because of the chemical and physical body changes.

TEACHERS SAFETY

Of particular significance are the adolescent need for self-definition (answering the question ‘who am I?’) and the shocking realisation that you now have to acquiesce to the demands of some people (such as teachers and parents) who may be physically weaker than you.

Before this time, people who exercise authority over you are usually bigger and stronger than you.

I remember an old and sickly nun in one a girls’ high school where I taught briefly who used to be supported by the girls when she was beating them.

Something in the minds of those girls kept them from fighting back or even running away.

It was a sense of deference to age and status that they brought from their village life.

In our traditional societies, the whole village was responsible for the uprightness of growing-up children. Unfortunately, any talk about going back to those days is completely unrealistic.

The school system complicated matters in the up-bringing of children.

The guiding philosophy was that the teacher would relate to the child as some measure of a parent-substitute.

However, this situation has changed not only for teachers but also for parents.

Today, a good number of parents dread the closure of schools because they don’t know what to do with teenage children at home.

From the goings on in our schools, teachers also don’t know what to do with them.

As we seek answers, we must think of the safety of the teachers themselves.

PROTECT TEACHERS

Unlike parents, teachers deal with hundreds, not just a couple of unruly children.

Even if we allowed corporal punishment in our schools, where is the guarantee that our increasingly unruly children will obediently allow teachers to continue beating them?

In our universities, there is the increasing nightmare of preventing them from cheating in their examinations.

A colleague of mine had a scuffle with a cheating student in an exam room. He had found the student with an unpermitted written material.

He snatched the material from the student to use as evidence. However, when the exam ended, the student accosted him, snatched back the mwakenya and destroyed it.

Like the rest of us, teachers are just professionals providing a service in the area of education. They have no special security training.

As we figure out the solution to the malaise in our schools, teachers need protection, be it using police officers or some other kind of security personnel.

Otherwise, we may one day wake up to face the shocking news of not just burnt dormitories, but murdered teachers.

Prof Okombo teaches at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]