The other side of Prempeh
“There are two things a person should never be angry at: what they can help, and what they cannot help” — Plato
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One of the weaknesses of our people is the reluctance to accept criticism if the import is negative or dysfunctional. We always expect the other person to make the concession even when we know we are wrong. My hope for the coming year is that we learn to feel for the other person as much as we feel for ourselves.
Prempeh College is by all means a very prestigious institution that many students would like to attend if they had a chance. What is more, the old students association, Amanfoo, as they are known, is one of the most active old students associations which mobilise support for the school and keep the name in the media all the time.
On Friday, December 13, Mr Joseph K. A. Bimpong, a staff of the college, took us down memory lane in anticipation of the 64th Speech and Prize-Giving Day that took place the next day. Reading through the article, one could catch glimpses of the good old days at Prempeh including the “Pocket Allowance,” which was added to the fees but paid to students before they left for vacations.
The recreational and socialisation facilities at the school, going by Mr Bimpong’s account, have reduced over the years even as the students’ population has ballooned.
It is an irony of our national development that in these periods of difficulties and negative media influence and cultural denigration, the need to provide counselling to students has reduced or is non-existent.
That may account for some of the dysfunctional developments going on at Prempeh College and perhaps many other senior high schools that may never be reported.
That is why I was alarmed. When I interviewed a number of first-year students from Prempeh College about their experience and they recounted harrowing developments - some of which give them nightmares - and they are delighted that they have a break; but for how long, they do not know.
It is for the safety and security of the newcomers to Prempeh College that I am taking the issues up. It is not intended to lower the estimation that people have of the school, but to expose it such that the authorities will be aware and predisposed to deal with it firmly.
As Dr Martin Luther King noted, whenever there was evil or acts that could lead to tension and break the peace, “we bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.
Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposure creates to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
If after the exposures the management decides to put up a rejoinder, there must not be a condemnation of my write up, for as Dr Luther King insists, “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and the seniors as privileged groups would “seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”
Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, “groups are more immoral than individuals.”
Management should not respond in a way that would seem to be ignoring the concerns of freshers, otherwise it would amount to what Bishop Desmond Tutu described as “victimising the victims twice.”
Now listen to the tale. A number of the parents who managed to enter the dormitories after their children had been provided beds soon realised that the pillows they brought had been taken away.
While some of the students thought that their pillows had been stolen and were weeping, a few parents asked the prefects around and were informed that at a convention at Prempeh College, it was decided that freshers would not be allowed to sleep on pillows.
There are also the tribulations that form one students suffer at the hands of their seniors; instead of 4.30 a.m, they are woken up around 1.30 a.m. to scrub, sometimes with their sleeping cloths on, wearing white shirts or carrying hymn books in one hand.
Again, while students are required to bring buckets, these are put into a pool and artificial shortages are sometimes created to harass the students.
These are some of the sordid details that some reticent student victims have been telling their parents after their first test of departure from home and living independently from parental care.
If the deviant students and authorities are quick to deny these developments, they must be reminded as Carlyle insists that “no lie can live forever” and James Russell Lowell that “Truth forever on the scaffold; Wrong forever on the throne; Yet the scaffold sways the future; And behind the dim unknown stands God; Within the shadows keeping watch above His own.”
Let us welcome the New Year with hope and belief that evil will not triumph.
