Young people traumatised by injustice in the education system are likely to replicate the same injustices toward those placed below them at workplaces and beyond.
Trauma becomes a hierarchical commodity passed down from those in power to those beneath them. Pain and trauma eventually become transgenerational.
Just like any other value, or virtue, in an even deeper sense, justice is part of the basic natural moral intuition. Children are sensitive to fairness, sharing and reciprocity. But our environment is important for the cultivation of this important value through education, culture and shared social life. Beginning in the family, one is slowly exposed to justice and fairness, and one is made to grasp the boundaries of one’s own comfort so as not to infringe on the rights and comfort of others.
Being immersed in a just social system is crucial for shaping the way one acts and relates in society. The ideals of justice determine what is normative and acceptable and what is unacceptable and even punishable. It is one value that protects the collective aspiration for the rights of every individual person and the responsibility of everyone in ensuring that no one is trampled upon or despised.
Looking at our education process, a deeper and more mature sense of truth, justice and fairness rooted in experience is far more important than academic performance, as it is these values which create a context for good use of education. Without deeper roots in these core values, education is likely to be a pipeline process through which people go through unchanged, or even worse, in which people come out with mastery yet with distorted values.
First experiences of systematised and systemic justice should be within our education system. I personally have had numerous encounters and memories of injustices while in educational institutions. These include my personal experiences as well as the experiences of my colleagues. There are injustices right from the lowest levels of education.
For example, being heavily punished collectively for a mistake of one person, for which I sincerely felt I was being treated unfairly. But I had to accept because I am not more special than all others who accepted being punished. On another occasion I was also punished for missing two questions out of 50 in the presence of a fellow who passed only 10 of those questions. While of course I don’t justify punishment as motivation, the rationality of the proportionality of that punishment was dubious even to my childhood self.
I can also recall a friend being punished for not being able to speak Kiswahili well, a classmate from a rich family being excluded from common correction or punishment, teachers skipping classes without telling the students the reasons, being shouted at for asking questions, and many other experiences that formed the cloak of habitual unfairness and injustice.
These experiences seem normal, especially in the African settings where corporal punishment is seen as indispensable in education. But these are severely damaging to the young people as they distort their sense of goodness, fairness, justice, dignity, and power dynamics, as well as respect for persons as different from fear of power.
The trend goes on even in higher institutions, where there are always problems between students and professors over trivial matters which could be resolved by simple dialogue, yet they are prolonged and complicated so that many young people end up being traumatised.
There are professors who are not known for anything they teach but for their oppressive attitude towards students, believing that they can make or bend anything in their lives. Stories of many graduates are full of pain. Maturation of unfairness and injustice becomes a systemic rot if care is not taken.
There is no doubt that experiences of schooling influence the way the whole system of our country works. The attitudes imparted in the school system impact the different parastatals where those beneficiaries work.
Young people with traumas of injustice from the education system are likely to inflict the same wounds of injustice on the people placed below them at workplaces and elsewhere. Trauma becomes a hierarchical commodity passed on to whoever is down by whoever is up. The pain and trauma eventually become transgenerational.
It is important that those in education systems work on not inflicting more traumas on the young, innocent, vibrant, and promising lives of our young people. Education should nurture our young people to become fair and just by showing them how. When these values set the environment in which young people are educated, those who come newly easily fit in and imbibe the values, which in time grow deeper roots in them.
With our nation being a young population, with over 70 per cent of all persons aged below 35, it is important that our systems impart the right values of justice and fairness, not by words, but by the experiences of those aspired values in its holistic functionality and public service delivery.
In a broader sense, it is important that these many young people are oriented to cherish their country as a just country by making it a fair and just country where no one is above the law and everyone can be held accountable for their actions. Otherwise we risk having the best of our young people seek to live abroad, given the limitations and trauma of unfair and unjust structures at home.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation and a student of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. Web: www.shimbopastory.com
