Public concern about student’s misbehaviour in schools is again taking centre stage. These problems may manifest themselves as physical or verbal abuse, yet sometimes they present themselves as disruptive behaviour. Many will remember with great horror the spate of killing committed by schoolchildren in the United States early this year.
At home too, we are inundated with news of children inflicting serious injury on the ir peers, and threatening bodily harm on the teachers. This type of publicity tends to heighten the debate among the teaching profession, parents and the public.
Prominent in such debate is whether or not the current levels of misbehaviour in Malaysian schools have increased significantly during recent years. Although these incidents have been tagged as “isolated cases” by officials of the Ministry of Education, the issue of gangsterism, harassment and bullying remains a perennial thorn in our otherwise respectable school system. Why is this so?
Are the misbehaviours part and parcel of growing up, and therefore should be accepted without much fuss? Or are they nothing more than the schoolboy pranks in line with the ‘boys-will-be-boys’ adage that we all have to live with?
Perhaps, the most pertinent question would be; problem children or problem schools? Obviously, not all behaviour problems in schools emanate from within the school. Children from problem parents can bring their problems to the school.
Many parents become defensive and irritated when confronted with their children’s misbehaviour, and therefore find it difficult to look hard at themselves, their attitudes and the way they bring up the children.
But if parents take great pride in the successes and achievements of their offspring, then they must logically accept that the reverse can happen. They can also affect children in unacceptable and undesirable ways.
With this in mind, parents must realise that the most effective way of managing misbehaviours is to work towards preventing them from arising, or minimising their occurrence.
A baby born into this world is pure. Its mind is unadulterated. Scientists claim that infants are a reflex organism, making adaptive responses to external stimuli. With experience, the representations of objects and scenarios in the world are synthesised and new motivations are build up.
A child gains thinking, perception of meanings and values entirely through imitation and training from, parents initially, and later, the wider society of peers and elders. Children also observe and take stock of what they observe, namely how adults live and do things in a certain spirit, and how they get on with one another in various ways.
They then add up, imitate and file away what they have observed somewhere in their spacious minds. So very often later, they fall in line with the particular moral counsel adults wittingly or quite unselfconsciously have offered them.
How many times have you noticed your children doing things exactly the way you do them? Or the way their peers do them? How many times have you heard your young children swear the way you swear? . How many times have you heard them snarl at the traffic the way you do?
How many times have you heard them make sadistic comments while watching TV with you, just like the way you do? How many times have you seen them perform character assassination of a complete stranger, just like the way you always do? Quite often, I would say.
We have seen how a baby born without trauma or sedation is strikingly alert within minutes of birth to the new world of sights and sounds. Instinctively, the wide-open eyes make finely coordinated saccading movements of the eyes. They may stop or change directions to fixate bright places, or track stimuli in motion.
Scientists and mothers alike, are astonished by demonstrations that babies less than a month of age are capable of imitating facial expressions. Expressions of happiness, sadness, or surprise are also imitated. With calling vocalisations, a similarly prompt imitation can be obtained when the baby is a few weeks old. And being the ones who are closest to them during the early part of life, parents can easily influence the type of behaviour and morality that their children develop.
Parents take great pains in ensuring that their little ones get a decent form of education. Some clamour to give their children a head start in life. Their children are sent to pre-schools at a very early age. This is to ensure that they survive in this ever-changing world. It is a jungle out there, they say. Accordingly, jungle rules apply. Only the fittest will survive.
This is quite alright. Learning trespasses our whole life, very much in line with the concept of education from womb to tomb expounded by the Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him). He also warns that parents can make or break their children, depending on whether they provide them with moral guidance or otherwise.
Little do some parents realise that the race to enhance the informational intelligence of the ir children often leaves the poor souls without much guidance in the realm of morality. This is why moral intelligence must be simultaneously instilled in our young ones.
One knows moral intelligence when one sees it, when one hears it at work a child who is smart this and that way, smart not with facts and figures, but with the way he behaves, and the way he talks about others and take them into consideration.
How do we provide moral guidance to our children? How do inculcate moral intelligence in them? Having described the mind of an infant as pure, it does not mean that it is simple and coherent. Romantic nativists argue that the infant is born with unspoken wisdom.
Thus, children do not develop themselves merely by relying on conditioning by their parents, they also constantly refines their reactions to particular events and formulate specialised skills to understand and deal with both physical objects and persons around them.
As parents discover rather quickly, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ certainly figure prominently among the first word s their young children start using as they enter into the second year of life. With this ability, babies learn about the minds of the people around them, what they welcome and what they do not like, or what they will not at all tolerate.
Love and care must be the instruments of early moral guidance. If only we keep close tabs on our children, give them all the comfort they need, then they will quickly and eagerly learn to pay attention to our suggestions and recommendations. Thus, the beauty of the mutual it y of moral guidance. Parents should stop treating it as a one-way street indoctrination.
We now come to the other half of the story of students’ misbehaviour, that is, problem schools. Understandably, many teachers are reluctant to acknowledge that the reason for students’ misbehaviour may be as often in their teaching as in the students’ inability to learn.
Reflecting upon our own childhood and adolescent experiences, we recollect the strict teacher with a penchant for administrating the corporal punishment. Invariably, however, this approach fuelled the tendency for misbehaviour to emerge in classes conducted by less punitive teachers.
There were also ineffective communicators whose inability to arouse academic endeavours from the class actively encouraged students to spend their time and energy on a variety of misdemeanours.
If students’ interests are not aroused and capitalised upon, if the teachers’ classroom skills are inadequate to manage student behaviour healthily, if there is conspicuous inconsistency among teachers in the way they interpret and enforce school rules, and if relationships between colleagues are fractious and non-supportive, then it is likely that students will misbehave.
Clearly, in order to get the ideal school environment for enhanced mental development and positive social interaction, problem- free children be dovetailed with problem-free schools. Otherwise, true to US President Bill Clinton’s latest quote, “the relationship would be inappropriate.”