Anarchic schools lose

ON MONDAY several hundred pupils of Alliance High School in Mbarara attacked and vandalised the Orumuri office in Mbarara. A story in the weekly vernacular newspaper about teenage pregnancies at Alliance had upset them. They threw stones and broke the office windows and the windscreen of The New Vision pick-up. They ransacked the Orumuri photo library and set photos on fire. They smashed office furniture. They then went on the rampage in Mbarara town grabbing copies of Orumuri and The New Vision from newspaper vendors. In the end the police arrested several pupils and a director of Alliance. This was outrageous behaviour by the Alliance students. Their wild protest over a story about sexual indiscipline proved that they were quite capable of the original offence. These students are supposed to be the future leaders of society. Their families are making great sacrifices to send them to secondary school. Yet how will they succeed in later life if they lack self-discipline? If they behave like anarchists when they reach positions of responsibility, they will cause chaos in the country. Unfortunately Alliance High School is not an isolated case. There are more and more cases of strikes and riots in secondary schools as a result of student indiscipline. Bad management is partly to blame but schools have always had poor food and tough living conditions. That is nothing new. In the end the ‘invisible hand’ of the market will regulate these schools. Eventually the schools that fail to discipline and properly educate their pupils will go out of business. Parents will no longer choose to send their kids to secondary schools with bad reputations. Respectable schools will prosper and anarchic schools will flounder.