Gareth Manning, Sunday Gleaner Reporter

Scores of students of the Kingston Technical High School on Hanover Street, downtown Kingston, mill around the schoolyard after a fight at the school left at least five boys nursing stab wounds last month. Classes were suspended for the day. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer

Faced with increased incidents of violence in schools, some educators have raised questions about the ability of teachers to deal with violence and sexual harassment in classrooms.

The educators say the curriculum in teachers' colleges does not prepare teachers to face and deal with violent outbursts. The most, they say, that is offered is pre-counselling for teachers prior to assimilation into their new environment.

In recent months, spates of violence have erupted in some high schools across the nation, leaving educators worried. Two incidents at the Kingston Technical High School last month stand out. In one incident a female teacher was , allegedly, sexually assaulted by two male students inside a classroom. In the second incident, five grade-11 boys received stab wounds after a gang dispute on the school compound.

Can't predict

Professor of teacher education at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Hyacinth Evans, says while teachers are trained to identify conflicts and to manage them, there is no way teachers can be trained to deal with students who are violent.

"I think we have to recognise that there is a limit beyond which we can prepare them," she said.

She said while teachers are trained to pick up signs of conflict, it is almost impossible to predict when an outburst will occur.

But Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) president, Hopeton Henry, says the curriculum at the teachers' colleges have deficiencies that need to be addressed.

He suggests some subject areas that have been removed from the curriculum need to be reintroduced. He says civics, for example, is a course that needs to be reintroduced into the programmes offered by teachers' colleges and would go a far way in addressing some anti-social behaviour in schools.

Family-life education

"Take the issue of family-life education and sex education, this again needs to be reintroduced into the curriculum," says Mr. Henry. He says while these subjects are a component of the guidance and counselling programme, they need to be taught across the board in colleges to help teachers cope with issues of sex and sexuality, and even sexual violence.

He wants the colleges to work closer with teachers, particularly in inner-city schools to help them cope with the incidence of violence in those schools.

"The current curriculum is not geared at this, so we are now having new concepts and we are now planning for violence prevention and so on. These things are overtaking the current curriculum for training," he says.

He believes what is needed now is for the colleges to bring in specialists to teach these programmes.