Education is everybody’s business

The messages marking the new academic year from Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Fr David Khan, Episcopal Vicar for Education, differ sharply in tone, but meet on essential ground: education demands discipline, responsibility, and partnership.

The Prime Minister’s message is blunt. Students must attend classes, respect teachers, and accept responsibility for their progress. Parents must prepare their children for school, monitor their behaviour and work with teachers, instead of transferring parental duties to the classroom.

Teachers, she insists, should be protected from abuse and empowered to preserve an environment in which willing students can learn.

Fr Khan’s pastoral letter places these responsibilities within the language of “faithful stewardship”. Children, authority, time, talent, and school resources are gifts entrusted to our care. Parents are the first educators; schools are their partners. Students are not passive recipients, but persons called to use their God-given gifts. Teachers and administrators are accountable not only for instruction and order, but for forming the whole person.

There is, however, a significant difference. The Prime Minister emphasises education as protection against economic struggle. Fr Khan cautions against reducing education to examination results, employment, or economic usefulness. Education must equip young people to earn a living, certainly, but also to live truthfully, responsibly and in service to others.

Their shared concern is justified. More than 22,000 suspensions were recorded nationally between 2022 and 2025, according to the revised National School Code of Conduct 2026, which identifies a marked rise in violence and serious infractions. Too many schools are managing bullying, disruption, disrespect, and violence while also trying to teach.

Discipline cannot mean punishment alone. Here, Fr Khan’s insistence that discipline must reflect both justice and mercy is crucial. Dangerous behaviour requires firm consequences, and teachers and students have a right to safety.

However, simply sending troubled children home may remove an immediate disruption without addressing its causes. Some young people carry family instability, neglect, trauma, learning difficulties, social pressure, or a profound lack of hope. Accountability and accompaniment must therefore work together.

Formation begins at home

Parents cannot be spectators to their children’s lives. Their responsibilities begin long before a school has to take disciplinary measures. Parents must establish boundaries, model respect, know their children’s friends and online lives, check schoolwork, listen for distress, attend meetings, and cooperate honestly when problems arise. Defending every wrong action does not protect a child.

But what happens when the home does not provide basic structure? A school cannot become a substitute family, and teachers cannot carry every social burden. Nevertheless, a school cannot simply abandon a child because responsible parenting is absent.

Its duty is to provide clear and consistently applied rules, identify problems early, communicate with caregivers and connect vulnerable children with counselling, learning support, social services, or other interventions.

Government must ensure those services exist and are adequately staffed. This also requires educators who are trained to distinguish wilful defiance from behaviour rooted in trauma, disability, developmental difficulties, or unmet emotional needs.

The larger conversation is not merely about controlling badly behaved students. It is about what kind of adults Trinidad and Tobago is forming—and whether parents, educators, churches, communities, and the State are willing to share responsibility for that formation.

Schools must be places of order, but also places where children encounter trustworthy adults, appropriate boundaries, and the possibility of change.

Education is everybody’s business. If we want trustworthy students, we must become trustworthy stewards of them.