High school rules versus human rights
High schools, especially boarding schools, are usually run on a set of regimented rules. Sleep time. Wake up time. Morning assembly time. Classes time. Dining time. Siesta time. Prep time. Roll call time. Inspection time. Church or other religious time. Uniforms. Dress codes. hairstyles. Length and size of shirts and skirts and shorts. No pidgin. Et 1000 irritating ceteras.
The authorities argue that they need all the students to be at one place (geographically, in attitude), to make their work easier. Thus, there’s very little room for exceptions because those simply open the door to more claims for more exceptions and then, it is argued, discipline would break down.
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When we went to boarding school, it was ‘Obey before complaint.’ ‘A breach of common sense is a breach of school rules.’ Only a medical reason (such as you are about to die!) could get you out of the regimented system.
In Mfantsipim School (Kwabotwe), you couldn’t wear charleywote to the academic site. Then, they created an exception: without a medical chit. So boys faked foot rot and got the chits.
Why? For ‘sheege’ reasons. And you couldn’t wear a non-sandal footwear without wearing a pair of socks. We called it ‘Mungo Park.’ I don’t remember the reasons given. Just do it. The senior boys defied it because they were seniors. ‘Sheege’ reasons! Breaching of rules ‘Attending dining’ and eating were supposed to be compulsory. We breached.
We were all served the same food, the awful ‘khaki soup’ and ‘baby shit’ with hard, bouncy yams. Even the beloved ‘dod’ (others unexotically call it ‘red-red’) had a million white substances in the beans, falsely rumoured to be maggots. We ate with relish. Protein! Jollof was once a year, at speech day, to hoodwink attending parents.
But the smoke flavour always gave the game away. The only exceptions to not eating the general diet were medical - for example, people with ulcers ate ‘pepper-freemeals, which were much better prepared than the general meals.
So plenty boys ‘developed’ ulcers, got the pepper-free meals and promptly added pepper_laden shito for taste.
Basically, we had the authorities playing catch-up all the time. That’s high school -rules and desperate attempts to breach them.
Choosing Schools
In choosing a school for your child, you are irrebuttably and irrefutably presumed to have checked what their rules are and determined that that is the best institution to totally groom your kid for you. That is why you are shown the rules, and then you sign them with your kid to indicate your acceptance and that your kid will comply.
The questions therefore are: after you have accepted to be bound by those rules and gained the admission, can you then demand exceptions for your kid on any grounds? Is that a binding document inter se, between the parent, the child, the school, the staff, other parents, other children? If so, under what circumstances would exceptions be given? Authorities argue that if they grant any exceptions, the next day, 300 other students SHALL demand the same exception on similar grounds.
Did you know that almost all schools ban occultic practices? Yeah. Written boldly in the rules.
But technically, isn’t that an infringement on religious rights? Or that is ok because presently, occultism is blamed for kids murdering kids for money rituals? Where do we draw the line between the full expression of our constitutional human rights and the constitutional clawback given to parents and ‘persons in loco parentis’ (I had to throw in some Latin just to impress you...it means persons in the position of parents) such as schools, in the raising of minors?
If I will not allow my 15-year_old to sport a shabby beard or wear his jeans with a redesigned waistline below his butt, showing his boxers, while he lives under my roof, eats my food, drinks my water, wears my clothes and..., wait for this..., breathes my oxygen, can a school make similar rules for minors under its care?
Where do we find a balance in the competing interests. Can affected parties negotiate small compromises so we all move on happily? Or are we going to wait for a general rule to be ‘legislated’ by the court, the decision of a supposed third_party-neutral called a judge, who also went to high school and might have LOVED or HATED the rules?
Ah ha! Talk to me about law and justice. I will remind you of the old saying from legal realists: ‘justice is what the judge ate for breakfast.’ This refers to the fact that there are many unconscious, subliminal factors apart from orin addition to the law, and which influence a judge’s decision.
So it will go from one judge to three, then to five and possibly to seven. Actually, it might go directly from one to five, and maybe seven, and then come back to one, then to three, then to five and then maybe seven.
Spell me conundrum! Find me situational compromises.
Climbing Walls Descending steep paths
And I am not done. Back in Kwabotwe, there were some rules that the authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to because of what I call ‘situational compromises.’
They knew that we were boys with huge appetites and we needed to eat more than the government provided. You can’t feed a teenager half a ball of yellow kenkey with Khaki Soup with Kako as protein (especially in the famine years of 1983 and 1984), and expect him to live.
And so, the rules on not leaving the school boundaries were quietly relaxed in two significant zones: the wall to Yorks (our elegant name to what is now inelegantly called“Gɔbɔ”) and the steep path to Kenkey Down.
In fact, we climbed that wall and walked that steep path so much that they developed holes as footsteps. And I don’t recall anyone being suspended for going to Yorks or Kenkey Down.
Although you were allowed to go to Yorks and Kenkey Down, you could be busted for going beyond those places. In fact, some teachers koraa sent boys to go get them some of the Yorks and Kenkey.
Unnecessary narrative
This leads me to the unnecessary Christianity v Islam narrative that is emerging over this. From where I sit, Ghana is partly to blame for all this: the educational system which meant
that at secondary school, almost all Muslim students went to school in the north and almost all Christian students went to school in the south.
The fact is that after being happily mixed in primary schools, almost all our Muslim friends went to school in the North. And so, for seven critical, formative and moulding years, we met and interacted with very few Muslims and vice versa.
Apart from refreshingly outlier schools like TI AMASS, the melting pot that secondary
school was meant to be, created no national amalgams. We simply didn’t know each other that well until we met in the universities. In fact, having a Muslim roommate in university was probably the first time some of us spent more than an hour with a Muslim since age 11 or 12!
And because schools in the South had very few Muslims, it was possible, in a school with just one or two Muslims, to insist that they should attend Christian church services. However, even in a school as ‘missionary’ as Kwabotwe, with time, the only two or so Muslim students among us were allowed not to attend Christian services. They just had to wear the cloth in the morning and white-white in the evening like the rest of us.
Of course, it raised questions about whether adherents of other Christian denominations
(Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses,) would also be allowed to have their own services. I recall it being tried for a while, and then the authorities said ‘no,’ but my memory is quite faint on that.
My point is that even in those situations, we found situational compromises that made us move along. We can learn from that and begin the moulding and formation that I think this nation badly needs. We don’t have to believe in the same things. But we don’t have to be at each other’s throats about them. Can these matters be handled quietly and professionally between parents and school authorities? Can we talk to each other instead of talking at each other? Can we generate more light and less heat?
