26 SEPTEMBER 2006

Deteriorating student behaviour no surprise

- Unfortunately The PPTA’s revelation that deteriorating student behaviour is putting staff at risk is no surprise.

“These teens entered a system of education and society where discipline and responsibility were replaced by the politically correct nonsense of childrens’ rights,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First. “It is significant that corporal punishment in schools stopped when the current generation of teenagers were entering the education system. These teenagers have also been the victims of the largest breakdown of marriage and family.”

“We now have a generation of children who have been victims of a social experiment of how best to raise our kids, and believing that family structure doesn’t matter. And it continues with the ideological drive to ban smacking, and some schools opening later in the day once kids have woken up.”

“Youth behaviour will continue to deteriorate for as long as we tell them that their rights are more important than their responsibilities, and that there will be no consequences of any significance for what they do.”

Since 2000, in primary schools alone, suspensions and stand-downs have jumped 31 percent, with alcohol consumption up 25 percent, physical assaults on staff up 40 percent, assaults on other students 33 percent, sexual misconduct up 21 percent and sexual harassment up an astonishing 83 percent.

Overall figures for primary, intermediate and secondary schools show that since 2000 there has been a 30 percent increase in assaults on staff, a 23 percent rise in sexual misconduct, a 39 percent rise in vandalism and a 43 percent increase in possession of weapons.

The American Medical Association, Academy of Pediatrics, Psychological Association, and Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry all came to the same conclusion in 2000. They said that prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.

And the magazine of the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that TV viewing by children can lead to violent behaviour, obesity, apathy, lower metabolism, and decreased imagination.

“We cannot continue to feed our society a diet of violent and sexually laden movies, tv programmes and music, and life-like video games without that behaviour being acted out by impressionable young people,” says Mr McCoskrie.

We shouldn’t be surprised by increasingly violent school campuses – unfortunately!

ENDS

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