PM: Conflict resolution coming to schools

The Government will be moving to introduce conflict resolution into the school curriculum, in a bid to address the country’s escalating crime rate, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said on Friday.

Addressing students at the Manchester High School, the prime minister lamented the incidents of young people injuring and killing each other last year, which is a now a societal problem.

“The social problems that we have, have become so challenging - they are now at crisis proportion - that the Government has to be direct and instrumental in dealing with this problem of violence in a frontal way. We are going to have to incorporate the schools now to deliberately teach, in the curriculum, how to manage conflict. It is going to have to be a curriculum subject,” he declared.

“We will be treating with the schools directly about treating with conflict, and about dealing with violence and building peace,” he continued. “We need to take a different approach as a people to solving our conflicts. We can’t use violence to solve our conflicts.”

Holness also gave a commitment that, having seen first-hand the need for an auditorium, the school would get one. However, he did not give a timeline for the introduction of conflict resolution in schools, nor for the construction of the auditorium.