Education Minister Fayval Williams is urging the nation’s teachers to remain resolute in the face of lewd, crude, and highly unacceptable behaviours from some students.
Her comment follows an altercation between a teacher and a student at the Tivoli Gardens High School in Kingston on Monday.
The student, a sixteen-year-old boy, has been charged.
In a statement today (June 8), the Education Minister said she knows that it must be severely de–motivating for teachers who have to deal with rising violent attacks, by some students who are demonstrating serious signs of anti-social and other types of maladjustments.
She added that it must also be disheartening to see videos on social media with students exhibiting behaviours that are totally inconsistent with what they are being taught, within the precincts of the classroom.
Mrs. Williams is urging the nation’s teachers to not lose their faith and positive motivation, for nation building, which caused most of them to enter the education sector.
In encouraging teachers to draw on their reserves at this time, she said the nation is in a fight against powerful influences in the society that are leading children astray.
Mrs. Williams said some of these influencers glorify vice as virtue, and prop-up disrespect, as something to celebrate.
The Education Minister noted that these forces cannot be allowed to nullify the good deeds of education stakeholders, who are working to see the nation’s children thrive and realise their full potential.
She added that there is no quick fix to the many longstanding problems of student misbehaviour, which have been worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic, where the majority of students were unable to access face-to-face learning for close to two years.
Mrs. Williams also reiterated her call for parents to give greater supervision to their children at this time, and to utilise the services of various government agencies that offer assistance to children and parents in need of help.