The forgotten root of it all

By Leonard St Hill
| Fri, April 27, 2012 - 12:01 AM

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Some citizens would be persuaded that law is for lawyers (to practise) all the while being admonished that ignorance of it is no excuse for anyone by whom it is contravened.

In that quandary, we come to question the intervention of the Prime Minister first in a matter that suggested the resignation of the Minister of Education, and then the appointment of a commission of inquiry to report to the Governor General on points of law.

In the contrariness at The Alexandra School, by abdicating the responsibility to deal with the issue, the minister effectively tendered his resignation which the Prime Minister appears to have accepted when he assumed the role of Minister of Education.

Concerning commissions of inquiry as substitutes for litigation, that might be one means of reducing the burden of unresolved cases before the courts; but even so, no commission of inquiry is appointed in the discretion of the Governor General without appropriate evidence of its national importance for investigatory and or advisory purposes.

Eventually, any advice taken from the commission must be translated into law before it can be implemented. But no law is valid retroactively, in the sense that it cannot create an offence in time before the promulgation of the law defining the offence.

When the report of the commission of inquiry is published, it might remind readers that the contrariness began with the incident of the address on speech day in which the principal commended classes of the school for their performance in examinations despite the abandonment of its duties by the regular unnamed teacher of those classes for the year.

That comment as part of the speech became the cause celebre in the contrariness of a work stoppage by some staff whose accumulated allegations appear to be against the authoritarian style not uncommonly attributed to strict disciplinarians.

In the course of all of this the matter of insubordination at the root of the part of speech will go unheard until a deep-seated cleavage of industrial relations by domestic culture is examined and remedied.

Are working women who dominate their households absolutely intractable at workplaces where discipline is imposed by male supervisors? Likewise, are working men who dominate their homes intractable at work where they are supervised by women?

What contribution does co-education up to secondary school level for adolescents make to any positive findings of the questions asked?