Business
Newsday
Diana Mahabir-Wyatt
When discussing employment issues with a human resource (HR) colleague recently, he brought up the ongoing discussion about youth violence in and out of schools.
His organisation has been asked by non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations to “do their part” in helping diminish youth violence in the community by hiring “at-risk” youths.
This will help them learn employable skills and work discipline, leading them away from a life of crime. He asked me if I thought it would work.
I was one of the founders of Servol with my old friend Gerry Pantin, back in 1960, joined shortly thereafter by Wes Hall. So, of course, I know it works.
That is what Servol has been successfully doing since the 1960s, when social unrest was even higher than it is now. So far, over 45,320 young people have been trained by Servol, and of those, less than three per cent have ever been incarcerated. Young, angry males were the ones most at risk.
With the growing emancipation of females, we are now also experiencing gangs of angry girls attacking vulnerable classmates as well.
Parents and teachers are unable to find a solution to what fuels the bitterness and anger of the young and, as my HR colleague pointed out, this makes them unsuitable for employment in even basic entry-level positions.
“In most organisations, we would like to help,” he said, “But we are a manufacturing enterprise, not a social-work institution. We can’t afford to hire more staff just to train them.” Well, you don’t know until you try, do you? If your existing staff might be willing to volunteer to take on the responsibility, it will give them new skills as well. It worked with Servol.
Demand for Servol’s trainees is oversubscribed. Over the past 20-something years, thousands of “at-risk” youngsters have passed through Servol’s doors.
Less than one per cent overall have subsequently been in trouble with the law. Does that sound different from the youth violence we read about?
When primary education has been limited and expression of ideas and activity opportunities are blocked by pre-colonial teaching methodologies – that demand silence, read-and-repeat and memorise-and-spew-back as learning methods – even the basic building blocks of learning may be crushed before students get into adolescence.
That is when they most need intellectual stimulation to motivate learning. Without it, frustration rises, and if gang crime is the only way they have to gain power or esteem, it may be the only motivating outlet available.
In secondary school, my fellow students were mainly from poor refugee families, displaced from war-torn Europe, as Latin American students coming to our shores are doing now.
They were struggling to learn the language, culture and basic economic survival skills. Children suffer from the frustration and stress of their parents – what any refugee family faces and what makes them and usually their children try harder – even changing their own family names in their desperation to be accepted. It is happening in TT as you read these words.
One underperforming boy in my class came from such a family. A refugee, he just didn’t fit in and was labelled as a problem in school.
His name was Walter Zuk, shortened from Zukoff, to fit into the Anglo culture preferred by the authorities at the time. He was an underperforming, problem student and was regarded as a hopeless failure. His family environment was dysfunctional, domestic violence making him a mockery among his classmates.
His class teachers recommended he be expelled from school for disrupting classes and being unruly in the schoolyard. The headmaster of the school was a genuine educator and was unwilling to face failure with Walter.
He found a family willing to take Walter in and he was given a second chance at school. The family he was placed in lived in my neighbourhood, so Walter and I used to walk to high school together sometimes in the mornings.
He joined the football team and adjusted with enthusiasm to both sports and classroom work under the headmaster’s mentoring and supervision.
He eventually won an engineering scholarship to university in Canada. That was many years ago, before education faculties included the study of neurophysiology and the effect of physical exercise on intellectual development. Real educators knew it, anyway.
Last I heard of him, Walter retired as the head of a nuclear physics institute in Australia. Without the intervention of someone who understands the testosterone and energy patterns of adolescent development, when setting the curricula in our schools and how it affects particularly the under-resourced areas such as Sea Lots, we have to ask, “What part does our education system play in preventing the tendency toward anger? In taking in front to prevent, not in punishing violence after it occurs?”
There was a press report recently that included some impressive interviews about the culture in our schools and its effect on the development of gangs. The article featured an interview with a young man sporting the heavy gold chain which is a symbol of leadership in some cultures, who was both observant as well as articulate.
He pointed to the complete lack of sporting facilities for the youth in his area and the high secondary-school dropout rate. The reporter interviewing him listened with respect and recorded it in print. I read it with the respect that it also deserved, as what he said reflected what a professor I had when I was doing graduate studies in education had said, “Young men have enormous stores of energy which must be expressed positively or negatively. High testosterone levels require outlets for these energies whether mental or physical, in young males between 12 and 22.”
Sometimes I wonder where Walter would have ended up without someone willing to act on this common-sense understanding. The article I referred to in our own press shows that victims of our system understand that. The cost of keeping youngsters in prison for a year is more than triple the cost of building a sports facility and providing maintenance and manpower to coach teams of young people.
The principal of UWI announced that growing numbers of young people are entering the Faculty of Sports Education and Management. Where will they get employment when they graduate, if not in the sports facilities that should be present in each community? We already have some 28 community swimming pools built and not used, because no one was hired to maintain them and provide community coaches.
We also see beautiful community centres furnished with computers and furniture in virtually every community that could be used to upskill young people looking for employment. But they are not open to the citizens who live nearby, because there are no staff to administer and maintain them. What is our public servants’ enormous budgeted programme against crime in place to do?
When discussing employment issues with a human resource (HR) colleague recently, he brought up the ongoing discussion about youth violence in and out of schools. His organisation has been asked by non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations to “do their part” in helping diminish youth violence in the community by hiring “at-risk” youths. This will help them learn employable skills and work discipline, leading them away from a life of crime. He asked me if I thought it would work.
I was one of the founders of Servol with my old friend Gerry Pantin, back in 1960, joined shortly thereafter by Wes Hall. So, of course, I know it works. That is what Servol has been successfully doing since the 1960s, when social unrest was even higher than it is now. So far, over 45,320 young people have been trained by Servol, and of those, less than three per cent have ever been incarcerated. Young, angry males were the ones most at risk.
With the growing emancipation of females, we are now also experiencing gangs of angry girls attacking vulnerable classmates as well. Parents and teachers are unable to find a solution to what fuels the bitterness and anger of the young and, as my HR colleague pointed out, this makes them unsuitable for employment in even basic entry-level positions.
“In most organisations, we would like to help,” he said, “But we are a manufacturing enterprise, not a social-work institution. We can’t afford to hire more staff just to train them.” Well, you don’t know until you try, do you? If your existing staff might be willing to volunteer to take on the responsibility, it will give them new skills as well. It worked with Servol.
Demand for Servol’s trainees is oversubscribed. Over the past 20-something years, thousands of “at-risk” youngsters have passed through Servol’s doors. Less than one per cent overall have subsequently been in trouble with the law. Does that sound different from the youth violence we read about?
When primary education has been limited and expression of ideas and activity opportunities are blocked by pre-colonial teaching methodologies – that demand silence, read-and-repeat and memorise-and-spew-back as learning methods – even the basic building blocks of learning may be crushed before students get into adolescence. That is when they most need intellectual stimulation to motivate learning. Without it, frustration rises, and if gang crime is the only way they have to gain power or esteem, it may be the only motivating outlet available.
In secondary school, my fellow students were mainly from poor refugee families, displaced from war-torn Europe, as Latin American students coming to our shores are doing now. They were struggling to learn the language, culture and basic economic survival skills. Children suffer from the frustration and stress of their parents – what any refugee family faces and what makes them and usually their children try harder – even changing their own family names in their desperation to be accepted. It is happening in TT as you read these words.
One underperforming boy in my class came from such a family. A refugee, he just didn’t fit in and was labelled as a problem in school. His name was Walter Zuk, shortened from Zukoff, to fit into the Anglo culture preferred by the authorities at the time. He was an underperforming, problem student and was regarded as a hopeless failure. His family environment was dysfunctional, domestic violence making him a mockery among his classmates.
His class teachers recommended he be expelled from school for disrupting classes and being unruly in the schoolyard. The headmaster of the school was a genuine educator and was unwilling to face failure with Walter. He found a family willing to take Walter in and he was given a second chance at school. The family he was placed in lived in my neighbourhood, so Walter and I used to walk to high school together sometimes in the mornings.
He joined the football team and adjusted with enthusiasm to both sports and classroom work under the headmaster’s mentoring and supervision. He eventually won an engineering scholarship to university in Canada. That was many years ago, before education faculties included the study of neurophysiology and the effect of physical exercise on intellectual development. Real educators knew it, anyway.
Last I heard of him, Walter retired as the head of a nuclear physics institute in Australia. Without the intervention of someone who understands the testosterone and energy patterns of adolescent development, when setting the curricula in our schools and how it affects particularly the under-resourced areas such as Sea Lots, we have to ask, “What part does our education system play in preventing the tendency toward anger? In taking in front to prevent, not in punishing violence after it occurs?”
There was a press report recently that included some impressive interviews about the culture in our schools and its effect on the development of gangs. The article featured an interview with a young man sporting the heavy gold chain which is a symbol of leadership in some cultures, who was both observant as well as articulate.
He pointed to the complete lack of sporting facilities for the youth in his area and the high secondary-school dropout rate. The reporter interviewing him listened with respect and recorded it in print. I read it with the respect that it also deserved, as what he said reflected what a professor I had when I was doing graduate studies in education had said, “Young men have enormous stores of energy which must be expressed positively or negatively. High testosterone levels require outlets for these energies whether mental or physical, in young males between 12 and 22.”
Sometimes I wonder where Walter would have ended up without someone willing to act on this common-sense understanding. The article I referred to in our own press shows that victims of our system understand that. The cost of keeping youngsters in prison for a year is more than triple the cost of building a sports facility and providing maintenance and manpower to coach teams of young people.
The principal of UWI announced that growing numbers of young people are entering the Faculty of Sports Education and Management. Where will they get employment when they graduate, if not in the sports facilities that should be present in each community? We already have some 28 community swimming pools built and not used, because no one was hired to maintain them and provide community coaches.
We also see beautiful community centres furnished with computers and furniture in virtually every community that could be used to upskill young people looking for employment. But they are not open to the citizens who live nearby, because there are no staff to administer and maintain them. What is our public servants’ enormous budgeted programme against crime in place to do?
