The President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Angel Carbonu, has voiced alarm over the rising unruliness among students in Ghanaian schools.
His concerns come in the wake of the tragic death of 18-year-old Edward Borketey Sackey, a Form Three student at O’Reilly Senior High School, who was fatally stabbed by a peer following a dispute over their fathers’ wealth.
In an interview on Eyewitness News on Tuesday, September 3, Carbonu criticized what he sees as a misplaced focus on student rights at the expense of maintaining discipline in schools.
He noted that external influences, including international NGOs advocating for students’ rights, have contributed to the erosion of crucial rules and regulations needed to uphold order in educational institutions.
“A certain group of people who, I don’t know, let me not use any expression that will create any problem, but some people come and talk about human rights. As if the teacher does not know what human rights are.
Sometimes when we go and get some financial support from some international NGO, then we forget that we need to establish rules and regulations that are in tune to the realities of our environment; don’t do this, don’t do that.
When you talk to the students like that, you are creating psychological injury to the students.
“As if to create the impression that whenever the students do wrong, we should kiss them pat them on the back and tell them that they can continue.
So, the school environment continues to become a place where students are beginning to become unruly and this is one of them.
Because why do you enter school premises as a candidate with a sharp object with the intention of doing what?” he questioned.
