When is it No Longer Boys Being Boys?

I’ve said more than once that being at my school is like being in Lord of the Flies. Everything I have seen so far has been mad chaos where learners are left on their own to handle things that should be dealt with by authority figures. This becomes extremely apparent before school and during breaks. When 500 learners aged between 6 and 20 are left unsupervised there are bound to be problems. If a child comes to the staff room crying because of something that happened during break, they are often turned away while the teachers laugh because it is absurd to them that they should be disturbed during their break to deal with petty issues among children. I recently learned that at my school breaks are meant for the teachers, not for the learners, and that means that they will not be bothered with school issues during said breaks. This complete lack of supervision and rules in general has left the learners to create their own ranks among each other, most significantly among the boys.

I have seen the evidence of this in my grade 6 class, where I have two boys who have recently turned 18. I now have boys and girls who are 11 in the same class with boys literally twice their size, and almost twice their age. I’m sure you can guess where the 11 year olds rank in the hierarchy created among the boys throughout the school. In my class I have seen more fist fights in the last five months than I have seen in my entire life. These are fights occurring in a room, with a teacher present, so how many do you thinking are happening outside when there is no one around to even try and break them up? When I have brought this issue up with the other teachers and the management at my school I have been given the same generic answers of “our learners are naughty” and my all-time favorite “boys will be boys”. I agree to some extent that boys will be boys. I grew up with two older brothers, and I have seen how they like to handle altercations, but I also believe that at some point that excuse is just teachers, parents, and authority figures being lazy and not wanting to monitor and discipline their children. The boys at my school have taken it upon themselves to be the judge, jury, and sheriff, and for all the people who have read Lord of the Flies what does the mad chaos escalates into, violence.

Last week was when the petty fights and arguments escalated past the point of boys just being boys. A 19 year old boy brought a knife to school, waited until classes were supposed to be starting, walked into a classroom and stabbed a 17 year old boy in the back of the neck. He knew that the first ten minutes of first period are when teachers are in the staff room “preparing” for the day. He saw this as the perfect time to corner the boy inside a small room, and that there would be no teachers around to interrupt his plans. The packed staff room was alerted to a problem when students began to pour out of the classrooms screaming as the boy was trying to escape his attacker. After a few minutes chasing around the school yard, that boy with the knife was finally tackled by our school security guard, and promptly locked in the principal’s office. The boy who was stabbed had a laceration on the back of his neck that demanded stitches and medical attention. Unfortunately emergency services such as ambulances are pretty slow to get out to rural areas, so some of the teachers strapped a bunch of gauze to the wound, put the boy in the back of a car, and rushed to the local clinic. The rest of us had the privilege of staying at school and trying to figure out what on earth caused this, and how the hell to get 500 gossiping learners to calm down and go back to class.

After the police showed up later to take the older boy into custody the story came out as to why he felt it was appropriate to stab another boy. Apparently on the previous Monday there had been a fight during lunch between the same two boys and a few of their friends. This fight was reported to staff members after the fact, but the two who started the fight simply received a slap on the hand with a stick for being disruptive. Nothing was done to figure out the reason for the fights or to help resolve the issue. So as retaliation, a few days later a knife was brought to settle the dispute. The fight eventually ended with one boy in jail and one in the hospital.

While the boy who was stabbed is now fine, he did have to spend three days in the hospital. The knife was shoved far enough into the back of his neck to reach his vertebra. As he was running to escape his attacker blood drained from his injury into his lungs, so a shunt had to be inserted into his left lung in order to drain it, so he was kept in the hospital to monitor for infection. He is now back in school and doing perfectly fine.

I realize that violent outbursts happen in schools all over the world, and that this is not just a third world problem. However, this incident really got me thinking about how differently we monitor and discipline students in the United States. When I had my first fist fight in class I sent the boys to the principal, only to have them sent right back. Discipline here is at the end of a stick, but pain only lasts for so long. Learners here aren’t afraid of getting in trouble because there are no lasting consequences. Getting suspended or expelled isn’t a discipline tactic used in this country, and even if it was, parents are so uninvolved that kids would probably welcome a few days off at home. There are no consistently enforced rules at my school, so the learners have made up their own and enforce them themselves. While most of these learner imposed rules are regulated by school yard fights and bullying, it seems that eventually they escalate to something more extreme. It makes me really curious what has to happen in order for the staff at my school to realize that this is beyond boys being boys, and that they need to do something in order to insure the safety of the learners. Obviously a boy getting stabbed and spending three days in the hospital wasn’t enough, because it took less than one day for the teachers to migrate back to the staff room leaving the learners unattended.