Common denominator in the rise of school indiscipline and street crime

 

The change was in the criteria that candidates to these leadership positions had to meet. From the 1970s, teachers were promoted to headships not on the strength of their performance as teachers, but based on their political connections. If they were active as ketua cawangan, setiausaha cawangan, etc they would be first choice for promotion. 

Ravinder Singh, The Malay Mail

There is a common denominator in the rise of school indiscipline and street crime. In both cases, there are rules and laws to be obeyed by children and adults respectively. Rules and laws remain pieces of paper until and unless they are enforced. To enforce the rules and laws, you need disciplinarians and no-nonsense leaders at the helm. In schools these are the head teachers and their superiors. In society they are the heads of police stations and their superiors.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s we had such leaders in both the schools and the police force. These disciplinarian, no-nonsense leaders were in those positions based on merit and proven track records. They did a fine job of ensuring that school rules and laws were properly enforced. So we had well disciplined schoolchildren and a good, law-abiding society. This is not to say there was zero indiscipline or crime, but things were kept strictly in check by nipping lawlessness in the bud. 

Then began the change that has brought us down to where we are today. The change was in the criteria that candidates to these leadership positions had to meet. From the 1970s, teachers were promoted to headships not on the strength of their performance as teachers, but based on their political connections. If they were active as ketua cawangan, setiausaha cawangan, etc they would be first choice for promotion.

Similarly, meritocracy was not just put in the back seat, but even thrown out of the window, in the promotion/appointment of other government servants to positions in authority.

When you put pilots in the cockpit who have not gone through the rigorous training that is needed to ensure the planes keep flying safely, and mediocre aircraft engineers and technicians to maintain the aircraft, you can expect disaster after disaster. The disaster from a plane crash is very much more easily seen than the disaster from not enforcing school rules and laws in society. The former disaster happens immediately and is very visible; the latter takes root, grows slowly and since it is not nipped in the bud, years later matures into an ugly head.

The ugly head becomes the focus of society as it impacts on society negatively. But why and how it came about is not looked into as its roots are by now very remote and out of mind. Is it less important to ensure that strict discipline is maintained in schools than ensuring that airplanes are serviced by competent engineers and technicians? The disaster from hundreds of thousands of undisciplined schoolchildren becoming adult members of society each year is greater than that from a plane crash.  

What we have in both the schools and the police are people who are not disciplinarians. In the schools, disciplinarian head teachers should be able to handle firmly not only the students, but also the teachers and parents. They should be able to get the parents to co-operate with them to maintain discipline, or else take the undisciplined children out of the school. In the police, the heads at each level should be able to keep those under them in a straight line. Here, another element comes in also — corruption. An unclean head cannot keep the rest of his house clean. But who is to see that the heads are clean? It is not that the police are poorly paid. A sergeant, at the age of 50+ can draw a salary of RM4,000. This is good pay for a non-graduate. The scale goes higher with the ranks.

What happens to the undisciplined children when they leave school? And mind you, this is not a small number as indiscipline is endemic in our schools. They do not leave their undisciplined character behind in the schools, but carry it into society. Thus schools are directly responsible for flooding the country with a young adult population that has not been taught to respect law  and order, that have no fear of the law, that feel no shame for wrongful acts, that do not know how to say sorry or apologise, that resort to violence as second nature. 

Regretfully, this dismal failure of the schools to inculcate the good moral and religious values that the children are taught in theory such that they are also internalised in their being, is not being seen by all those who talk about the need to curb society’s moral decline.

The Malaysian Crime Prevention Foundation, researchers into crime and policing, psychologists, etc who are concerned about the crime situation should wake up to the hard, indisputable fact that if children do not internalise respect for school rules, i.e. law and order, while in school, they cannot be made to change into law-abiding citizens in adult life. 

What these concerned people should do is adopt SMK Alam Megah as a research school. It is now well known that this school has a serious discipline problem. Then get the experts who have been advocating that children be disciplined through love (e.g. Marisa Demori), counsellors as advocated by Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye, researchers on crime and policing in the universities, to be stationed full time in the school for one year as attachment teachers so that they will face the students daily in the classrooms. Let them use their various methods of changing the character of the students, keeping complete record of what is done each day. At the end of the year, we should know which method works. If three months after these experts leave after their one-year on-the-job research stint, good discipline remains intact, then the most effective method employed could become a model for other schools.

A start has to be made somewhere to restore discipline in schools and maintain it throughout a child’s school life, so that he graduates into public life as a worthy citizen and not a potential criminal and liability to the nation. It would be appropriate for the Crime Prevention Foundation to start the ball rolling in this direction without further ado. 

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