Students' first days need to be made constructive

Simon Marcus Gower, Jakarta

In the past days and weeks schools across Indonesia have been opening up their doors again to receive students entering the new school year. Naturally enough, this has been a time of many trials and tribulations as existing students join new classrooms and new students try to find their way around a new school.

Such times would be difficult enough for even adults. In adult life we need time to adapt to new settings and find our footing and direction to settle in and come to terms with what lies ahead. This kind of experience, difficult enough in adulthood, can prove extremely challenging for the, as yet, still young and forming hearts and minds of school age children.

A humorous cartoon once depicted a mother and father the night before a first day of school alongside a depiction of their child. The child slept snugly in bed, whilst the mother and father struggled to sleep and were clearly restless and nervous. This can quite often be the case; worry-laden parents can make a bigger deal of first days in school than children who are often quite capable of being flexible and adapting to their new surroundings.

However, the opposite can also be true and children can become highly distraught and upset by the experience of the beginning of a new school year and it is at this kind of time that they may need much support and guidance -- even counseling -- to help them get through a difficult time in the best possible way and constructively set-up the grounds upon which learning throughout the school year may quickly and efficiently be set.

The extreme reactions that children can have to first days in school can be so great as to create concerns for their health. Some children can be so overwhelmed that they suffer near nervous breakdowns with crying, hyperventilating and even violent vomiting getting in the way of them getting into school. In such potentially traumatic times as these it is surely only reasonable and right to expect a school to be on-hand with staff and policies that will assist children to deal with their problems.

This would seem like a duty of care that might, reasonably enough, be expected of schools but just taking a look at what has been happening in recent days and weeks in Indonesia would seem to suggest that such a duty of care is not really being taken seriously and, in fact, it could be argued that it is being significantly neglected. Indeed this negligence towards a duty of care would seem, in certain instances, to be so great that instead of protecting and looking after children at a difficult time schools are allowing childrens suffering to be increased and worsened by, quite frankly, idiotic behavior.

Orientation days in many schools have been allowed to degenerate into often moronic and consistently useless abuses and insults towards students. Instead of trying to build constructive relationships and establish a sense of mutual respect in schools, existing students are allowed to engage in the kinds of "freshman foolery" more associated with American universities or worse still abusive "hazing" that is more common in military boot camps than caring and thoughtful schools supposedly dedicated to education.

The kinds of nonsensical antics that could be witnessed recently included new students being required to wear ridiculous and often insulting nametags around their necks, being required to wear socks of different colors and wear paper hats of the type that would have (one hopes, in previously less sophisticated times) been seen to symbolize a dunce or fool. All of this goes on with seniors being given an apparent free-reign to scream and shout at their juniors in a way that is rather more army sergeant-major than schoolyard senior.

It is to be wondered what possible constructive outcomes are expected or associated with this kind of behavior. Some may suggest that it is a way of "setting tone" towards discipline and getting new or junior students to instantly have respect for their elders and their teachers but this miserably fails to realize that respect (if it is to be true and lasting) cannot be forced, it has to be earned and to be really effective it needs to be shared; i.e. the junior respects the senior and vice versa, junior respects teachers and vice versa.

Respect is not achieved through the forced and moronic behaviors of students in the first few days of schools. Also, the damage that may be done to a child's self-esteem and confidence should not go unnoticed in all of this fooling around. The early days of a new school year are a great opportunity to generate a sense of shared belonging, a sense of respect and ownership for the people and the place that make up a school and, in turn and with time, build up a sense of teamwork and community that will benefit the whole school year.

Of course, there will be those that claim that orientation day "hazing" is just harmless fun and that the children are just being given a chance to enjoy themselves -- whether they are the abusers or the abused. In some cases this may be true and the children may be able to construe it as such, if there is some sense of teambuilding going on in the activities. But this seems rare in orientation hazings.

Children can consistently be observed with glum expressions on their faces as they fall victim to first days' fooling around. Most often they do not seem to be garnering any fun from the experiences they are having and any learning seems really remote and unlikely.

During the first days back at school great opportunities exist to try to develop a sense of community that will help students to settle in and have a firm foundation on which to build their studies during the coming year. There are almost constant complaints that there is too much to study for school students and yet time is, every year, wasted on negative and useless orientation day pranks and fooling around.

Surely, when time pressures are of such a concern and teachers complain that they have too much to teach from the curriculum, the first days of school would be a great time to help students prepare for the challenges ahead. Constructive teambuilding and guidance towards much needed study skills would serve these students far better than nonsense tasks and ridicule.

Schools should design these days carefully and not let them be so negligently and dangerously wasted. The benefits of good early learning experiences can be considerable and the duty that schools should exercise to consider a child's psychological welfare really have to leave little room for first days of school of such waste and ridiculousness.

The writer is Executive Principal of the High/Scope Indonesia School. The opinions expressed above are personal.