As a child I attended a little ‘infant’ school in Moneague run by an excessively sweet lady, Mrs Winnifred Campbell, then known, before she was married, as Miss Wallace.

It was way back in the 1950s, but the lady is still very much alive and the last time I saw her, about a year ago, had I allowed it she would have cooked an entire cow for me although we ate home-grown chicken that day.

In ‘town’ I went to another infant school called Bible Way Mission on Waltham Park Road, and the main or only memory I have of that school was a bag of ‘sweetie’ that I was given just before the Christmas holidays.

At Trench Town and Jones Town primary schools the teachers there were so much in love with their profession that one got the impression that they would kill to maintain excellence in it. Not actually kill as in taking one’s life but if one was moved to find a new meaning for ‘fervour’, the nearest word that a young child could conjure up would be kill.

The young children were the raw material and somehow, they were the engineers trying to bring shape and value to that raw material. As they worked on us, we didn’t know it then, but they all loved us and treated us as extensions of their own children, almost all of whom attended the schools and were given no special favours by their parents.

To a large extent we feared them, but we now know that what our young minds were doing was figuring out how to pronounce the word respect.

A teacher back in those days was the person in the community who walked tall, with her head upright, and all who approached her knew that she was someone special who was deserving of much respect. At high school, some of us bordered on the fringes of excess but eventually the teachers brought us back into line and towards viable adulthood.

From that time to now, based on what has been happening for too many years now, it seems that teaching has backpedalled into the primeval ooze. The good teachers have reason to be concerned and I would advise them not to cling too much to that need for huddling close to each other because one sure result of that is they will be part of a chain that will only be as strong as its weakest link.

At a particular school, we are told that a male student recently turned up with extra-tight jeans and was sent home — without the jeans. It’s a bit of a horror story, but perversely he is a lucky fellow. In our days we were stuck in khaki uniforms and, in high school where we discovered that girls were going to be a permanent fixture in our lives, we tried everything with the uniform — neat pleats, white handkerchiefs placed in the back pocket with just a sliver of it showing, etc. As I said, that fellow is lucky to have the freedom to wear jeans.

That said, it could have been that the student was wearing his pants hanging down low with his drawers showing in that disgusting-looking style purloined from the USA prison system. But, we are told, the teacher insisted that he let loose some of the stitches so that the jeans could have been rendered less tight and more fitting as ‘school attire’.

Surely, at that stage, the teacher should have realised that a dangerous border was being breached. The story gets murky, but we understand that the student left the school compound, or was sent home, without his jeans, that is, he arrived home, ‘bo-eh bat’.

The frame switches and the movie script tells us that the screenplay writer is a sick person. At the school gate, the grandmother of the boy who showed up at the school a few days before she was informed to do so, is being roughly pushed outside by security guards and one approaches her menacingly as if he wanted to do something to her that he would have done had no cameras been there.

This is Jamaica in 2013 where ‘no man nuh tek no check’. We push back at everything. Students are unruly and too many teachers have reached so far down to tackle this behaviour that they now find they cannot claw their way back up towards earning respect and attaining excellence.

The security guard at the gate figures that the grandmother needs to be ‘disciplined’ and he is the perfect person to do so. Somehow in the script, the writer has made all the players villains.

The teacher should have sent the boy home if, in her reasonable judgement, the student had breached the rules of attire. At no stage should removal of his clothing be considered as an option.

The grandmother seemed to have been standing up for her rights, but the director of the movie needs for us to see it all as murky and leading into any direction. Did she overstep her bounds by showing up at the school days before she was asked to do so in representation of her grandson and his jeans, or, the very lack of one?

It is said that during the transatlantic slave trade, the most defiant captives from West Africa were dropped off in Jamaica and somehow, that assertiveness, displayed from many angles, has never left our system. The action of the security guard was testament to that.

Coming on the heels of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) and the minister of education trying to eat extra hot soup from the same bowl, this just did not look good. Mr Doran Dixon, lecturer at Mico University College and a past president of the JTA who wants the presidency again, had just referred to the education minister as a ‘mongrel dog’ and reminded us that he is an angry puss.

When we were young we had no idea that teachers had real-life problems. It was never in the forefront of our minds that teachers had to pay rent, mortgage, light bills, purchase groceries and wear a different outfit for five days of the week. We knew them as teachers, but our young heads did not allow us space to peer inside their humanness.

Mr Dixon blew a fuse when the education minister signalled that liberal study leave with pay and long vacations would be coming to an end because the country was up to its neck in debt and was not earning enough to keep that debt to controllable limits.

The JTA has always been PNP-oriented and, as the political party of the educated class, the PNP of the 1950s, 1960s was the JTA’s natural ‘home’. Much has changed, and today it cannot be reasonably said that the PNP is the party of the ‘educated and intelligent class’.

At the same time, we do not quite know how to classify the JLP, except to say that it exits best when it is in limbo, that is, oscillating between ‘over here’ and ‘over there’.

What is also painfully obvious to us is that the JTA seems eager to convince us that it is most fitting as the ‘puss’ in the fight between puss and dawg.

It may be unfair of us to expect that the JTA would want to convince us that its members are the cream of the crop of the education sector in Jamaica. Maybe it just wants us to see teachers as merely the next person in the line to the poorhouse or the madhouse, so it would suit us to lower our expectations.

There are some teachers who believe that there has to be a pushback against the rampant undisciplined behaviour of students and parents. Unfortunately, too many times in this pushback we cannot tell who is whom. Most of what we hear are the shrill snarls of cats rutting.

Fool-fool truck scale policy

Give a man a job and you give him a shot at finding his dignity. Separate him from his job and you introduce him to bad thoughts.

Let him see quite plainly that his inability to hold on to that job and earn his bread is not as a direct result of his employer failing to properly manage the business but has crept up on him because of bad government policy, and all you do is pile anger upon those bad thoughts.

It is no secret that our roads are in a terrible state. As one aspect of attempting to control the weight of heavy-duty vehicles moving overloaded cargoes, a truck scale was introduced at the eastern end of the island in Harbour View.

At first, overloaded trucks were ‘fined’ a small amount of $1,500 but that was only in the interim phase. At present, overloaded trucks must off-load their excess and, of course, the operators of these trucks have to stand the cost of this by providing their own moving and storage machinery.

What this has done to a perennially crippled St Thomas is that it has driven the nail in its coffin.

Let me explain. The quarries in St Thomas produce some of the finest aggregate in the island, a lot of which is in high demand by local users and for the export market. Outside of quarrying, St Thomas is basically dead with a few bars and shops clustered around its small towns.

The quarries used to employ ‘permanent’ workers, a fading concept in this globalised village. At full viability the quarry operators would take on additional ‘temporary’ workers.

Truckers are rational people, so instead of facing the inconvenience of making a St Thomas trip, over the last few months they have switched to sourcing their raw material from other parts of the island where there are no scales and they are pretty much free to overload as they see fit, with no sanctions.

As much as the quarry operators in St Thomas have made overtures to the Government and made noise and resorted to street protest, it has all fallen on deaf ears.

On the face of it, the truck scale policy was not a bad one. But placing only one scale and doing so in the region where the only good thing going in the dead economy that is St Thomas, it sounded the death knell for the quarry operators and especially the workers.

Most of the quarries in St Thomas are now closed and this policy, planned by the last JLP Administration, has turned out to be nothing more than extremely poor planning by the Government.

Let us admit that the priority has to be the protection of the road surface all across the island, but it is the duty of Government to examine the consequences of its policies, especially when they are applied piecemeal.

To me, it is only fair that scales be placed, at the very least, at three other locations at mid-island and at the beginning of the Junction road. In that way, all will have a fair shot at earning something. To encumber only the St Thomas operators with the Harbour View scale has resulted in a radical decline in what was left of its economy.

Equity demands that the present Government approach this matter with a full appreciation of the unintended economic consequences of the truck scale policy.

Will the Logistics Hub take wings or will it remain grounded?

One gets the sense that the Opposition JLP would not want to see any success in Jamaica making it big with the planned Logistics Hub if it should happen under the watch of the PNP.

At every opportunity the JLP has poured cold water on it and, much to my surprise, the PNP Administration has been providing the JLP with the ammunition for the criticism.

At a well-attended Logistics Hub retreat held in February, two very important people who were slated to attend did not do so — the prime minister and Transport and Works Minister Omar Davies. I spoke to a businessman in relation to the Worthy Park lands where the Caymanas Economic Zone, as part of the Hub, is to be situated.

He said “The operators of the sugar lands there, I would tell them to keep on operating for as long as they wish because I just don’t believe that what is being said about development there is anything more than chat.”

I have been ‘cheering from the gallery’ for the Logistics Hub, and the more I do so is the less eager I am to applaud.

First, Dr Lloyd Cole, who has been pushing his Dry Dock and allied facilities for more than 20 years, has met with ministers Anthony Hylton and Omar Davies, men under which most of the activities of the Hub, which includes the dry dock, would fall.

In his meeting with Minister Davies, Dr Cole was immediately hooked up with an international agency for the funding of the prefeasibility study. At present, the land at Jackson Bay is being surveyed and leases are almost in place.

It appears to me that there is a lack of cohesiveness in the PNP Administration in regards to the Hub. It is either that many Cabinet members are not sold on it or they are hedging their bets, just waiting to see which direction it takes — wings or remain on the ground.

I speak to Dr Cole quite regularly and he pretty much doesn’t care which minister leads off on his dry dock plan, just as long as it happens. And, as much as I believe Dr Davies was a wrecking ball in his stint as finance minister in the 1990s, it appears that he is the go-to man in Works in moving from chat to action.

We have heard a lot from Industry, Investment and Commerce Minister Anthony Hylton about the Logistics Hub, and I was recently told that a joint statement is to be made by himself and the prime minister in matters relating to the Hub.

I want to remain a believer but I have had enough of the talk which leads to nothing. Let’s hope that when the joint statement is made we will be more convinced by the laying out of concrete plans.

The country cannot afford to miss this opportunity and I am extremely pleased that plans for the dry dock are moving faster than they have ever been.

Where is joined-up governance, PNP?

observemark@gmail.com