In a recently published letter in which I rubbished the idea of boot camps as a solution to our issues of juvenile delinquency, I also made reference to continuous assessment as a measure to curb the incidence of school violence.
I hereby make a public appeal to the government to immediately set up a Centre for Psycho-Social Assessment, linked directly to the Ministry of Education, networking with the Ministry of Health, and charged with the responsibility of working with our children from pre-school to tertiary level. This perhaps could fall under the purview of the Children’s Authority.
The focus of this programme should be primary healthcare where the promotion of the physical and mental health of our children is paramount.
The purpose here is to map the development of our children throughout their various stages, with the view to engage in appropriate interventions when required. This means that issues that threaten the physical and mental health of our children can be flagged and treated before they escalate into the kind of problems we are encountering now.
This approach will include the assessment of the living conditions, family dynamics and other environmental factors that impact on the psychological and social well being of our children, which is at the core of dysfunctional behaviour in our schools.
Our children attend school with the weight of the psycho-social problems affecting the home; inadequate nutrition, various forms of abuse and neglect, exposure to major negative influences, and forced to function in a highly structured and competitive academic environment which demands their full attention.
It is not difficult to justify consideration of this centre as we can see our present trajectory is taking us into a state of anarchy in short order. We have become a society like the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail. We are reacting to a range of problems from recession to a breakdown in our education system.
Our criminal elements function with disdain as our judicial system labour under systemic lethargy, and our jails thrive as universities of higher criminal learning. What is worse, our school children have fallen into the whirlwind and are now a part of the madness that is taking over our society.
A pro-active solution is urgently needed if we are to save the next generation from this mayhem. We have no shortage of trained professionals, as every year we churn out hundreds of social work and psychology graduates from our universities and colleges.
Let’s put them to work in the Psychosocial Assessment Centre and give our children a fighting chance to survive in our society.
Further we must teach our children to be sociable; the art of living in a family, community and society.
Rekindle and improve the Health and Family Life Education curriculum, replace exams with assessment programmes with a view to streaming our children into their appropriate vocational paths and include sports as career options.
If we remove exams we will automatically remove the word failure from our vocabulary as it relates to our children. This will remove the pressure from our children and once more make school days happy days.
Extract some of the billions allocated to national security and invest it in this programme for the development of our children, and in time we will reap the benefits of a substantial reduction, even elimination, of crime and juvenile delinquency in our country. Incidentally, there will soon be a shortage of policemen and soldiers to deal with the escalating crime situation, what will we do then?
Garvin Cole
Tobago
by email