'The whining schoolboy'

Lance Neita, Contributor

Back-to-school time seems to come earlier each year. The sales signs were up in the stores from early July, and the next two weeks will see the last-minute pounding of the pavements as parents rush to squeeze the last penny 'to get the right shoes for the chile'.

Back-to-school always comes with a great deal of trepidation and concerns. Parents tear out their hair when the book lists arrive and the auxiliary fees are circulated. Children strategise on how to trick their parents into buying the latest but unorthodox styles that can be woven into the traditional school uniforms. And as the mango season recedes into the distance, and the memories of the trips to the riverbank or the bush cooking picnics fade away, the student reluctantly turns attention to making the necessary adjustments to his or her lifestyle.

Pretty soon we will see the all-too-familiar sight of Shakespeare's "whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school".

At this time children are returning home to prepare for school, having spent time with their loving grandmother in the country.

Back-to-school for me meant a train ride to Balaclava, to be picked up by the Confidence or the Bugle Boy bus, and them chugging across the Santa Cruz mountains to offload at Malvern for the final leg to boarding school on the peak of the mountain.

Striking message

Those days of back-to-school innocence have gone. A rather striking and harsh message can be interpreted from a recent cartoon seen in an overseas magazine which has a youngster smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer on a street corner in the middle of the day. "Disgusting," points out an adult passer-by. "You ought to be in school."

"Heck, lady," replies the delin-quent, "I am only five years old."

Signs of the times or not, social values have declined to the extent where character development and discipline are at risk of virtual disappearance from our schools as teachers battle with every-day problems arising from the dominance of crime, violence, broken homes, lewd behaviour on buses, poor adult examples, and the sad music culture that have tainted the social and economic environment.

The hype over the back-to-school preparations is never helped by the perennial complaints of classrooms not ready or the teacher-shortages that plague the minister of education whoever he or she happens to be. This year will be no different, as the present minister puts his ministry plans into place to face down the usual charge that "with just over a week to go the situation for many new and returning students to primary, secondary and tertiary schools across the island seems grim".

Nightmare

The annual Jamaica Teachers' Association meeting in Ocho Rios, which takes place just before the commencement of the school year, is also a kind of nightmare for ministers as the raft of issues always includes wage negotiations from as far back as I can remember.

I wish the parents, students and teachers well. In this day and age, every child must have a stylish bag over the shoulders. Gone are the days of the slate, the common exercise book, and the ruler and pencil that sufficed for the first day of term. Expensive school books are now the order of the day, and the laptop computer is about to replace the square and compass.

In 1968, schoolboy gabardine long pants sold for 39 shillings and sixpence, and the short pants version for 13 shillings and sixpence. That's roughly $4 and $1.36 in today's currency language. Girls' Oxford shoes could be had for 35 shillings and eleven pence, while the Dunlop rubbers went for 37 shillings and sixpence.

'How I spent my summer holidays' was always the first composition to be written on the first day of term. It would be interesting to compare an essay on that subject written in the 1950s, to one written today.

Comments may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com or lanceneita@hotmail.com.

The hype over the back-to-school preparations is never helped by the perennial complaints of classrooms not ready or the teacher shortages that plague the minister of education.