In the aftermath of the fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old Irwin High School student on Thursday, April 18, the president of the National Parent-Teacher Association (NPTAJ) Stewart Jacobs is calling for a national approach to promote the principle of conflict resolution in children.

Raniel Plummer was fatally stabbed outside his school gate after being attacked by a group of boys following an altercation with another student earlier in the day.

Jacobs, in expressing his condolences to the parents of the deceased student, called on the agents of socialisation to play their role in encouraging conflict resolution.

“The NPTAJ is calling for parents to do exercises that show solidarity with each other regardless of the political divide and the geographic divide that they come from. It comes from the political machinery, the social machinery that exists, the classroom and the other is the church. We find that the traditional churches are doing their best to preach the gospel but you find that the new way of churches is now preaching prosperity-how to make money, which is not doing our society any good. When the traditional churches were on top, crime and violence in society was down, it has been proven,” he said.

The NPTAJ said has become the norm for children to act out in society without being reprimanded.

“What is happening now, there is no avenue for children to express themselves and they are not agreed with. Wherever they go and they express themselves, they are agreed with, there is no one telling them that this is the wrong way, because it is now an eye for an eye, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth in society that we live in. It is coming from the parents and the adults that are around them. There is no longer that area that says there has to be a stop to it. When you have children going through love triangle it borders that out children are growing up too fast, where is the parents in all of that? Where is the civil society in all of that?, where is the curriculum that is telling them these things are wrong?” Jacobs questioned.

In 2022, the education ministry announced that over 2,000 participants from 81 schools, which include high and primary schools, were trained in conflict resolution.

However, Jacobs noted that these programmes need to be delivered on a wider scale to be effective.

“What they are doing is quite isolated, it is not blanketing the entire spectrum because we used to have this type of behaviour in inner-city schools. That is not happening, it is now happening above Half-Way Tree, it is not happening above Montego Bay, it is happening at boarding schools. It is happening at traditional schools, it is happening at non-traditional schools because our society has now become very intertwined and all-embracing to new ideas together. It is not happening anymore,” he said.

He added that it requires everyone around the bargaining table including parents, teachers, church leaders and the education ministry.

“To come in and do a little piece of the curriculum it is not working. You have to start at the basic school, not high school. It is too late. Secondary school, it is too late. Primary school it is also too late. We have to do it from the infant level when they are two. Start teaching them to shake hands, start teaching them to say I am sorry, start teaching them to say please, good morning, thank you, basic manners. Civic need to come back to schools. We stand for the national anthem, we stand for the national pledge. We recite it with pride it is not happening anymore. You have children who do not know the national anthem but you have children know every line that some of the DJ’s are saying and they do not know the national anthem,” Jacobs added.

He is imploring the education ministry to take a more hands-on approach to tackling the situation.

“The Ministry of Education need to get out of their office and get into the middle of society and fix the problem because we are imploding. They need to go into the middle of society and fix it and stop staying from a distance,” the NPTAJ president urged.