Orientation weeks are just hazing sessions

Orientation weeks are just hazing sessions

Simon Marcus Gower, Executive Principal, High/Scope, Jakarta

A recent email message from a high school student reads, "I
hate the way they treat us at this school. Every year it is just
the same. Orientation weeks in my school are just a nightmare."
It seems like a terrible reflection on the state of schools in
Indonesia. These comments and others like them have been received
over the past few weeks, as new school years have been getting
underway.

Do they reflect students' unreasonable expectations of their
schools or do they represent a genuine concern and need for
improvement in the way that schools are managed?

Educators could just dismiss these kinds of reflections as the
natural misgivings of students beginning a new school year.
However, such convenience does not exist for educators here.
These complaints about the behavior exhibited in schools during
orientation weeks represent something that are at best
regrettable but more likely unnecessary, foolish and even
foolhardy in the potential damage that it may do to the students
who are subjected to this, at times, ridiculous behavior.

The kind of foolish antics that both seniors and teachers are
prone to get up to during orientation weeks represent nothing
short of the kind of offensive "hazing" that has been exhibited
in military boot camps. Seniors often take pleasure in
humiliating their juniors in school.

In almost every circumstance, this kind of behavior has to be
looked upon as also quite offensive and even disgraceful. What
makes this behavior even more disgraceful and even more
unacceptable is the manner in which quite often teachers stand
aside, watch and even condone this kind of behavior.

Students are always liable to behave in childish ways and play
pranks and practical jokes on each other. But often in Indonesia
childish behavior is allowed to go unchecked and pranks are
permitted that can be damaging and represent something very
similar to bullying.

The kinds of childish antics include insisting that peers walk
about with nothing on their feet and run the risk of injury. Boys
will be required to wear girls clothes and even make-up. It is
hard to imagine what educational value is to be found in such
behavior.

Girls too are liable to experience things that are less than
useful to their school lives. At one school in Jakarta the girls
from one class in the school were called upon to visit the
teachers' staff room. They went along thinking that the purpose
of this visit was to introduce them to teachers. They went back
to class in tears.

The purpose of their visit to the teachers' room was to
present an aggressive warning demanding obedience and
"appropriate behavior" from them throughout their time within the
school. The teachers had considered it appropriate to shout and
scream at the girls, making them leave the staff room in a state
of literal nervous shock.

What, effectively, these school girls had experienced would be
better placed in an army training camp, rather than a school that
is supposed to be welcoming and introducing its students to a
learning environment within which they should feel comfortable
and well supported.

Teachers that conduct themselves within this kind of
mentality, with this kind of disrespect for their students are
living in the past. They are living in an environment that does
not treat students with respect; instead it considers students to
be objects; to be little more than creatures that must be
controlled, that must be put in their place and that is a place
immediately and emphatically beneath their seniors and most of
all beneath their teachers.

Educators that are stuck with this kind of mentality are
educators that fail both themselves and their students. They are
living in a world in which they think it is appropriate to
command and demand respect rather than showing that they are
worthy of respect and earning respect through their actions. They
are then, in short, doing far more damage than good.

Educators must be respectful of their students. By showing
that they possess this kind of respectful and honorable mentality
towards their students, (towards those for whom they are
responsible for in education), they are showing an example which
will benefit the students and allow them to pass on the life
enhancing and honorable character trait of respect for others.