T&T: To heck with the U.N., give us discipline

Ellen Lee Pow, principal of Holy Name Convent Secondary School, Port-of-Spain, says school violence is a youthful response to perceived parental and societal lack of caring. This parental and societal disinterest, she says, is demonstrated by "allowing children to dress, speak, come and go and watch on TV what they please."

Mrs. Lee Pow advocates discipline as a demonstration of love requiring "sacrifice and courage and is a process in which everyone must get involved." Furthermore, Mrs. Lee Pow wants a return to community responsibiloity for the actions and welfare of the child. "She urged the audience to intervene if they saw children causing mischief instead of the usual reaction, which is to 'close our eyes and ears and hurry by'." In addition to firm discipline, she argues that children need "supportive listening.”

Mrs. Lee Pow is talking more sense than the U.N. child welfare bureaucrats. When Hillary Clinton parrotted the African proverb "it takes a village," Hillary misconstrued the proverb to mean big government. Wrong. The village is the community itself that serves to check the child in the act of wrong doing. When children are allowed to do wrong in the sight of adults in the public, they swiftly learn that no one will exercise authority over them. Therefore, children act to the detriment of society. However, when all of society plays an active role in the checking of the child's worst impulses, the chief beneficiary is the society itself. Nobody says that strangers must issue corporal punishment to the child; that is the business of the parents only. However, adults and peers must be able to address the child concerning his wrong-doing. They must also be able to bring complaints to parents without fear of being cursed, threatened, or sued.

No parent raises his child for himself for it is the society that, in the long run, must deal with the child. Either the society checks the child while he's young, or the law will check him when he's older. By then, it will be too late.