The grammar school days bullying of the times of Tom Brown appear to have crept into our school system with a vengeance and crudeness.
A few days ago, a social media post depicted an act which of course does not belong to modern decent societies such as ours. A bully whose act indicated that he was going for a kill as he held a colleague student by the neck left all who watched the video almost traumatised.
That the act was choreographed as it were in one of the country’s top senior high schools has added to the worry of observers of our public schools.
Have headmasters, housemasters and other officials in our school system been sleeping on their jobs?
At first we thought the subject was playacted, and not finding any rejoinder coming forth in that direction and following the two actions taken by the school and the education ministry, the conclusion is that it could not be fictional but a reality.
Be it as it may, we shudder to think that the victim could have died at the hands of his aggressor.
We have learnt that the school authorities have meted out punishment to the bully and interestingly the victim. We stand to be corrected on the foregone.
We want to be convinced that the rather lame punishment meted out to the bully is the most appropriate under the circumstances given the fact that the victim could have lost his life.
We demand a full-fledged investigation into what happened, with a view to arriving at the circumstances that led to the bullyish action and to establish whether or not the act is commonplace in Adisadel and other senior high schools. It is in order to find out what headmasters and other authorities in the schools system have been doing to stem such bullyish tendencies among the student population.
Had death not been obviated we would have been singing a different tune from what we are currently.
Shouldn’t there be a system by which such actions are reported immediately to the authorities? What are student appointees there for when such acts can be perpetrated without any swift action to stop them and presto.
In the absence of an appropriate action against the bully and the school authorities, there could be a recurrence of the nonsense in another form.
It is for this reason that we demand a response which can transmit fear down the spine of those who regard such crude behaviour in the school system as a norm, so they steer away from it.
It can only be conjectured how parents at home would be feeling upon seeing the video. The situation is even worse for those whose wards are in form one in senior high schools across the country.