Violence and Indiscipline in Schools - Some Reflections

Day in, day out, year after year, there are continuing and increasing reports of acts of violence and indiscipline in schools.  Invariably, the response has been to introduce more and more stringent measures to deal with the situation, with very little attempts at understanding underlying causes.  Even as we engage in stop gap measures that are inadeqate and piecemeal, our efforts barely extend beyond these.  However, are we truly asking the right questions about why our teenagers and young adolescents, in particular, opt for violence rather than resolution?

There are no easy answers to this question, because this is not a simple problem.  Hence, the approach to the problem cannot be a simplistic, one-pronged approach.  To address the question of violence and indiscipline in schools, we have to take a systems view into the developing contexts of our teens and adolescents and see in what way these various environments may be exacerbating the problem; something to think about.

Something else to think about; in education, we often talk about developmentally appropriate responses to the need of young children, but this construct hardly ever is used with reference to teens and adolescents.  I propose that this another angle that needs to be explored and may be just one that provides additional justification for the development of mediation skills in equipping students to handle and manage conflicts in their life.

The teenage years are a truly difficult period developmentally for young people; yet, often in our dealings with them this is not acknowledged.  Thus, instead of fostering postivie relationships that will assist them in their identity formation and role clarification as they attempt to find their place in this world, we often spend an inordinate amount of time berating and reproaching them in ways that put them on the defensive.  This often results in the deviant behaviours that we have come to acknowledge as indiscipline and school violence.

The challenge, therefore, is how do we empower our young people to make right choices without losing face?  How do we acknowledge the developmental changes that they are going through and the influence on their behaviour, while equipping them with the skills and strategies to cope?  How do we get them to trust adults, while we impose the appropriate boundaries that are necessary to safeguard their well-being?  These are just a few of the questions that I think we need to answer if we are to make any headway in dealing with this whole issue of violence and indiscipline in schools.  Fighting fire with fire never outs the fire!