THE RULE AGAINST CELLPHONES in school is for the student’s own protection. Cellphones in schools lead to violence. Case in point . . . .
A high school student was caught with her cellphone out during class. The teacher ordered her to give it up and she refused. A police officer assigned to the school was called to the classroom and mistook her for a bowling ball.
Either that or he wanted to flip the classroom chair so it wouldn’t get wet from the rain. He didn’t realise the girl was still sitting in it and ended up mopping the floor with her.
This latest viral cellphone video incident takes place in South Carolina. Barbados and South Carolina have a historical connection. Many enslaved Africans were taken from Barbados and shipped to South Carolina. It was in South Carolina where it is claimed that legendary Barbadian plantation owner William Lynch delivered the mythical speech “How To Make A Slave”.
In the speech Lynch argues that you must break the will of black men and women to resist. Officer Ben Fields happens to be white, and the young lady happens to be black. Only one person at the scene of the altercation dared to question Officer Field’s brutality. That female student was arrested for speaking out.
When you watch the video you see the black male students and male administrator bow their heads and look away. If not for this incident being caught on tape who knows how it would have played out.
Officer Fields’ nickname among students is “the Hulk”. He has a reputation for being aggressive with black students. One young man defended Fields saying he was always very fair and communicated well with students. That young man says once Fields caught him with a knife and calmly explained to him why it was wrong to have it and then let him go. The boy happens to be white.
We don’t want that kind of thing happening here. If it does, we certainly don’t want another student catching the incident on camera to make things worse. Cellphones become a real problem in schools when they start to expose all the real problems in schools.
Not only are students doing wrong things, they are getting themselves caught by recording their deeds and sharing the videos on social media. This leads to them later on in life robbing banks and posing with the cash on Facebook. The educational system is definitely failing because lawbreakers are getting dumber. So no to cellphones in schools.
The cellphone video culture is a threat to law and order. We can see in the USA that the proliferation of videos showing abusive police officers is affecting their ability to pursue justice. Justice Jones from Martin Luther King Blvd, Atlanta, was about to get a beat down by officers, after being stopped for running a red light. The officers saw a man with a smartphone recording from across the street and decided to let Justice go with a warning instead.
Before you go playing the race card, check the deck to see if it was manufactured by the Klu Klux Klan or a company or nation that built its power and wealth off the slave trade. If so then playing the race card would be redundant because racism would be at the core of the game.
In the case of Ben Fields, the officer who manhandled the young lady, school officials insist that race could not have been a factor in his behaviour because he has been dating a black woman for some time.
A similar argument has been made on behalf of Dylan Roof who confessed to shooting and killing nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof said he hoped to ignite a race war. Christon Scriven is black and said to be one of Roof’s best friends. According to Scriven, Roof is not really a racist because he had originally planned to shoot people at the university down the street from the Afro-American church.
South Carolina has been forced to look at itself and its racist past and present. After the murders in Charleston, several institutions which had once defended their right to fly the Confederate flag as part of their heritage decided it was time for the symbol of the slave-holding South to be removed.
We are past all that here. We are so past slavery and colonisation that we can allow their symbols to remain flying high. Tourists can come to Barbados and use their cellphones responsibly as tourists do. They can take selfies at the foot of the statue of slavery-defender Lord Admiral Nelson in our Heroes Square, or with slave-holding George Washington at George Washington House, complete with local slaves and all.
Schoolchildren cannot use cellphones responsibly, however. They are too ill- disciplined. Just as we comprehensively and decisively dealt with the indiscipline of ZR drivers by painting vans maroon and white, and we stopped schoolchildren from dirty dancing by banning the drums at Inter-school Sports, we will solve the problem of indiscipline in schools at the root: cellphones.
Never mind that the entire world is being driven in the direction of cellphone use. This great nation does not have to seriously consider the future just as it does not have to seriously consider the past.
Teachers have enough problems managing schools without the added burden of indiscriminate cellphone use. But then again, if cellphones are allowed in schools, maybe an increase of video scandals would help the rest of Barbados understand and appreciate better what teachers really have to deal with in 2015.
Adrian Green is a creative communication specialist. [email protected]
