Youth 'kill, commit rape, steal, get drunk and drive'

Mrs Laurenda Owusu, a Justice of the High Court on Saturday urged teachers, policymakers and parents to adopt a positive approach towards instilling discipline into the youth.

She said stakeholders should encourage the youth to learn to lay apart all filthiness and bad behaviour and receive with meekness the correction that come with deviant behaviour.

Mrs. Owusu was speaking at the 63rd Speech and Prize Giving Day of St Mary’s Senior High School on the theme: “Sustaining discipline in today’s youth - challenges for stakeholders”.

“The youth should not be weary of correction. I know that no correction is pleasant but afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness and moulds us into responsible adults,” she added.

She said the aim of discipline was to set limits restricting certain behaviours or attitudes that were seen as harmful against school policies, educational norms, school traditions and others.

Mrs. Owusu said: “It is no secret that today the youth kill, commit rape, set fire, steal, get drunk and drive, and are involved in burglary and robberies to harm innocent people in our communities”.

She noted that the major cause of breakdown in discipline among the youth was parental irresponsibility: “the more society becomes complex, the more we as parents tend to shrink our responsibilities to our children”.

She said: “We pass on those responsibilities to house helps, nannies and even teachers, whose morality we cannot vouch for, all in the name of work and search for money, by the time we become aware, our children would have imbibed values we may be surprised of”.

Mrs. Owusu said counselling should remain a core component of the educational system and training.