Empower Guidance And Counselling Teachers To Adress Indiscipline, Ministry Of Education Urged
The Ministry of Education has been advised to strengthen guidance and counselling departments in secondary schools while also attempting to address rampant cases of student indiscipline.
Reverend Godfrey Jomo, an outspoken PCEA cleric, urged the ministry to empower guidance and counselling teachers by organizing workshops to help them improve their skills.
“This will equip them with vital skills to enable them to handle learners suffering mental challenges more effectively,” he stated.
Rev. Jomo told KNA in Mbari ya Nguura village in Gikondi, Nyeri County, that the ministry should give guidance and counselling teachers less work so that they can devote more time to students in need of psychosocial support.
“They should also be housed in respective institutions to enable them to offer services even at night if need be,” he said.
At the same time, he reiterated his earlier request to the Education Ministry to send chaplains to all secondary schools to provide much-needed mentorship and spiritual nourishment to troubled children.
“The chaplain supports students through moments of stress, depression and other emerging issues,” he explained.
The cleric urged the government to act quickly and to deploy chaplains to secondary schools in collaboration with various churches to ensure students’ mental well-being.
He regretted that, unlike in the past, when parents took the time to nurture and discipline their children as they grew up, today’s parents are too preoccupied with amassing wealth to bequeath to their children when they die, resulting in very irresponsible teenagers.
The Nairobi School Chaplain, who is also a clergyman, blamed poor parenting for recent arson incidents in some schools across the country, which reduced property worth millions of shillings to ashes.
“School unrests are mostly started by children who lack role models, abuse drugs, those highly pampered to the extent of lacking awareness regarding societal ethos and consequences of breaking them, as well as those who discuss teachers with their parents and also children who dictate what prescription they will take or not take in life,” he explained.
He advised parents to instil the value of hard work in their children’s minds at a young age, warning that spoiling them only made them irresponsible in adulthood.
The chaplain encouraged students to express their grievances responsibly and never resort to burning down their respective learning institutions, comparing those who raze down school buildings to a drunkard who drinks himself silly to get away from family problems, only to sober up later and discover nothing has changed.
The clergyman, on the other hand, advised school administrators to listen to their students’ concerns, to motivate them when they succeed, and to avoid exposing them to violent media content.
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Administrators, he added, should also weed out chronically misbehaving students before they influence colleagues to violence, discourage rowdy events with high decibel levels that could amplify emotions, avoid unsupervised entertainment, and prevent outsiders from visiting students.
“A well-cut out programme for extra-curricular activities should be put in place and students must be accompanied and monitored by teachers during such events,” added Jomo.
Empower Guidance And Counselling Teachers To Adress Indiscipline, Ministry Of Education Urged