Conflict management to be added to school curriculum, says Holness
Published:Saturday | January 13, 2024 | 10:43 AM
Prime Minister Andrew Holness says conflict management will be added to the curriculum at schools as a means of reducing violence in the society.
He gave the update while addressing students and teachers at Manchester High School in Mandeville on Friday.
Holness referenced data indicating that a significant percentage of the shootings and murders are committed by young males under 24 years, adding that they are predominantly the victims of violence.
“We have a problem with resolving conflicts… we have a problem with violence. But we also have a problem with our young men [being] in conflict and using violence [to resolve it] and being the victims of violence," he said.
“Governments usually try not to get too involved in regulating households, even in how they discipline children. But the social problems that we 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."
Holness said: “we need to take a different approach to solving conflicts; we can't use violence to solve it.”
“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."
Holness said there will be greater collaboration with the National Parenting Support Commission and educational institutions to reinforce best principles of conflict resolution.
In December, Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) President Leighton Johnson, said his organisation wants an increase in the number of social workers that are assigned to each of the seven regions of the Ministry of Education to deal with gang violence in schools.
The JTA boss noted there was an upsurge of gang-related activity in schools when the institutions returned to face-to-face classes after the pandemic forced classes online for two years.
- JIS News
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