‘It is impossible to give up educating without renouncing education’ |27 September 2021

« Nou pa kapab touzour kre lefitir pour nou bann zenn, me nou kapab kre nou zenn pour lefitir » - Franklin Roosevelt.

This was what our Minister for Family, Youth and Sport, Marie-Céline Zialor, said on the occasion of the International Youth Day.

She is right quoting Franklin Roosevelt, we have to train our youngsters to be able to face the future…we have to offer them all that our country can offer so that they are able to face a future that will be more and more complex or even uncertain ...! Our challenge is to be able to instill a dose of hope and a certain capacity for resilience...!

Daniel Hameline, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Letters, an internationally recognised specialist in the history and philosophy of education said:

“It is impossible to educate, without believing, without hoping, that is to say without being indignant at the state in which the most precious good of humanity is found, its childhood, doomed to nuisances of all kinds, to stupidity, to the carelessness of the species that we are.”

We know that. We know that the Rights of the Child on which Janusz Korczak wrote a first text in 1921 is far from being respected on the planet. Three hundred thousand (300,000) children die every year in the world that could have been avoided; over a hundred million (100 million) live in the streets; four hundred millions (400 millions) are exploited at work in undignified conditions; child prostitution is growing with impunity in several countries; in Africa, more than 180 million children do not have access to any form of schooling.

If we know all this, we sometimes forget. We “operate” in “systems”, we evolve in universes where the tumult of our adult quarrels risks making us deaf to the calls of childhood.

This is why we have to wake up from time to time from our doctrinal slumber, get rid of our habits and our certainties – no doubt necessary to avoid sinking into despair – and revitalise ourselves in what, literally, “animates” us – gives us life and obliges us to move on.

In Seychelles, our educational system is doing well. There are also several youth-oriented devices which are doing a real good job; among them we have the orphanages and the President's Village. But our country seems, for the moment, to remain deaf to a fringe of our youth which is adrift ... in drugs, petty theft and sometimes prostitution...!

It is this bitter observation that we were able to make in 2018 during our six- month mission with the Ministry of the Family which implemented, in connection with the social service, an experimental accommodation system at Perseverance which received a small group of youngsters with personal, social and family difficulties.

Normally, this project was to be perpetuated from 2019 as part of a permanent construction on a government land ... Certainly, in the meantime, the Seychelles, like other countries in the world, had to face the pandemic. The economy was at its lowest in the absence of tourism. Priorities shifted ... and that we can understand...!

It’s an evidence, concerning the pandemic situation, that we have not left the tunnel despite a small glimmer that we can observe. Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the psychological suffering that has hit our youth in an exacerbated way, especially the most fragile among them. ..!

I read lately that the National Commission for Child Protection was appointed on September 15, 2021 by the Minister for Employment and Social Affairs Patricia Francourt. We hope that under the chairperson of Dr Erna Athanasius, this Commission will be able to bring forward recommendations in the direction of child protection, especially for the most vulnerable. Because this task is a vast one and it deserves our full attention...!

Because the educational requirement has no limit ... It is impossible to give up educating without renouncing education. This requirement commits us, as much as our leaders and the members of our civil society, to continue to seek, unceasingly, new mediations and new devices that we could adapt to our most fragile youth...!

This concerns the future of our youth and that of our country…!

Frank Underwood

franck.underwood@wanadoo.fr