For those who aren't familiar with this issue: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/teacher%E2%80%99s-impromptu-haircut-on-schoolboy-sparks-debate-20120823.html
First, let me say that I think the school made mistakes.
The first mistake was to fail to give the parents a clear and firm warning with the consequences outlined. Given that the child in question is obviously accustomed to expensive haircuts, I am quite sure this has happened before. If the school had put its foot down at the right time, the parent wouldn't have a leg to stand on. This was not the teacher's fault, but a matter of school policy.
The second mistake was to fail to enforce the disciplinary rules at other times. Again, it's clear that the child in question is accustomed to having his hair styled in this manner. He's been in this school for 6 years, and the school has apparently done nothing about the matter, until his PSLE. Someone is obviously sleeping on the job at that school, and it ain't the teacher in question.
Second, the teacher made one mistake, which was to overreact at a critical time by having the kid's hair cut on the day of the exam. Seriously, you couldn't have done it 1 week earlier? Just send the warning letters out earlier lah!
Third, I think the child is largely blameless. I just read a forum thread about this case, in which people are criticizing him for being a mummy's boy, etc. Personally, I feel sorry for him, because he's been fundamentally messed up at an age when he can hardly understand what has been done to him, and by whom. He deserves sympathy, and possibly counselling by someone who holds better values than his parents do.
Finally, the mother.
It should be blindingly obvious that the damage done to this poor child was inflicted mostly or entirely by his mother.
To start off, the merits of getting a $60 haircut for a P6 child are debatable. Conditioning him to believe that any haircut other than a $60 one is a bad one - is absolutely revolting. Yet that is precisely what the mother, through her actions, has done.
Next, the audacity of the mother is outrageous. If you send your son to a particular school, you're responsible for getting him to abide by the school rules. Yet she deliberately flouted the rules by sending him for a haircut which was in violation of the rules, after having received a letter outlining said rules.
Most importantly, the rules are there for a reason. I'm the last person who would blindly follow arbitrary rules (well, maybe not the last, but you get the point). However, the point of haircuts and uniforms, especially in this day and age when long hair is no longer a sign of drug abusers (etc), is to inculcate certain values in the child - values such as justice and equality. To wit: your child is not a precious little snowflake. It doesn't take a lot to make a child like yours. 30 misspent minutes of 2 people's time will suffice to do that. Your child is to be treated no differently from all the other children in the same school, regardless of whether their parents can afford $60 haircuts or $16 haircuts or $6 haircuts, and that's why his hair and uniform have to follow regulations. By insisting on a $60 haircut which makes her child look different, this mother has basically repudiated the notion that he is subject to the same justice and equal treatment that all the other children receive.
But then, of course, she probably doesn't believe it herself.
After all, for all the talk we hear of slippage in young people's moral standards, they had to get their values from somewhere. And whilst we may argue about whether some liberal values have crept in from the West, there is one damaging 'value' which has enshrined itself in Singaporean society from the very beginning, passed down from generation to generation, and whose corrupting influence is all-pervasive now - as we can see in this case.
It's the love of money. And, as we all know, it is the root of all kinds of evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment