The report carried in the newspaper’s edition the day before yesterday by colleague Evangelia Sizopoulou was very good news indeed: the Ministry of Education’s Educational Psychology Service and its Counselling and Career Education Service have prepared a joint framework for dealing with serious incidents of violence and severe delinquent behaviour in schools. These incidents mainly involve physical, verbal, sexual, psychological or online violence, with the infliction — or intended infliction — of serious bodily harm or intense psychological distress on another person or persons.
The policy document behind this initiative, which is a move in the right direction, has already been sent to schools and, as the report notes, sets out common practices for identifying such incidents, managing them appropriately, and ensuring systematic monitoring and review of the relevant procedures by teachers.
The document notes that, according to research evidence, incidents of violence and delinquency in schools “are associated with low academic performance, low achievement motivation and negative emotions among pupils. At the same time, research supports the view that failure to develop prevention and intervention actions leads to an increase in the frequency and intensity of such incidents.”
The most important part of this policy document, in my view, is precisely that acknowledgement: that academic failure is, in effect, the womb from which violence in schools is born, and that prevention must take pride of place in any effort to eliminate it — or at least to contain it.
And prevention, of course, must begin long before a child starts lower or upper secondary school. Long before the “delinquent” child begins to feel “hatred” for school and starts, for example, to… set fire to schoolbooks — a mild form of delinquent behaviour seen from time to time in various schools, but one that may prove to be the… first step on a violent path.
What does prevention look like? It can look like what the Ministry of Education did a few years ago, when it honoured a primary school that had adopted a programme to promote books and reading. Even during breaks, the school set up an outdoor library, while every classroom had its own library. The award was given as part of efforts to encourage good practices in preventing delinquency, and in recognition of the fact that love of books — of every book, schoolbook or otherwise — must be cultivated from kindergarten.
And, of course, that love of books and of knowledge must first and foremost be held by teachers, professors and parents themselves, so that they can pass it on to children as a healthy view of life — not as yet another method of grade-chasing rote learning.
