Violence In School

YOUTH AND VIOLENCE
Broken down topic- Violence in school
THEME: The factors contributing of violence in school and the effects which it has on children ages 13-18.

Take new look at school violence
Story Created: Jul 1, 2010 at 4:46 AM ECT
Story Updated: Jul 1, 2010 at 4:46 AM ECT 
The violence in the El Dorado schools didn't develop overnight. Nor is it likely that these two schools are any better or worse than other secondary institutions whose pupil population comes from a comparable demographic. The Education Ministry's statistics show that 70 per cent of problem schools are located along the East-West corridor. If the El Dorado schools are in the spotlight now, so too was Arima Government some years ago, or Mucurapo Secondary before that; and so too will other schools be in the spotlight before too long. Unless, that is, the education technocrats, encouraged by new leadership at the political level, change their approach to this issue.
Violence in schools has been a preoccupation of the Ministry for much of the last decade, over the periods of two successive PNM administrations. Conferences have been held, and foreign and local consultants hired. Yet the El Dorado West and El Dorado East schools, to cite the instant example, have become a whiteboard jungle within which feral juvenile delinquents prey on peaceable and other peers. The Ministry's much-touted "Peace Plan", in place for over seven years now, has produced less than stellar results.
Ministry technocrats should consider the possibility that this failure is partly because the causes of violence listed in the plan are so vacuous: "television, movies, video-games", "breakdown in family", even "world violence". The research on media influence on youth violence remains equivocal; family patterns in Trinidad and Tobago haven't changed in the past 20 years; and "world violence", even if it did once improbably affect our local situation, has arguably declined.
Since persisting in the same course...