Pacific death school

Institute criticised for paramilitary approach

There was a national outpour of grief in Tuvalu last month when 18 girls were killed in the island nation’s worst disaster last month.

They were electrocuted as they tried to escape their burning dormitory, Prime Minister lonatana lonatana said.

Fourteen of the girls were piled up at a locked door, while three others and their matron were found elsewhere in the building. lonatana confirmed the girls had been locked in to protect them from their male classmates. lonatana said 18 girls aged between 14 and 17 as well as an adult matron died in the fire at Motufoua High School at Vaitapu, north of the main atoll of Funifuti. Previous reports said 17 girls had died. He said it was standard practice to lock the girls into their dormitory.

“We have the girls locked in and in each dormitory there is supposed to be a matron.

The matron locks the door and locks everything to ensure that the boys are kept out from the girls.” He added: “The boys are not locked in of course, not normally.”

Asked if it was necessary to protect girls this way he replied: “Yes, from young men and young boys going after young women and girls so normally we lock in the girls.”

The fire spread rapidly. “It was started off by a candle light by one student who was not obedient to the orders of the school,” he said.

“She must have fallen asleep and just above her bed, or the bed which caused the fire, is a power point. “Some by-standers saw that it was electricity that carried fire to every part of the house.” The fire was fanned by a strong wind, he said.

“The girls were all piled up, instead of being piled up one by one from the door.

They were all in one place near the door.

“It must mean one of the girls had (electric) shock and the other girls touched her and she was shocked too and the bodies kept up accumulating. Fourteen bodies were found in one place.” He said one survivor had gone back into the building.

“She has told the story that she came back to try and save her friend but she saw her

friend on the floor alive. The girl told her not to come closer, that she had a shock and could not He said the dormitory had two doors, one through a matron’s room and another outside door, which is where most of the bodies were. A night-watchman kicked in the matron’s door and then tried, from the outside, to get through the other door. “He couldn’t do that because the kids were all piled up inside the door of the dormitory.” lonatana appealed for international aid to help the dead girl’s families and the survivors who were still suffering. lonatana said authorities had now been ordered to leave dormitory doors and windows unlocked. “We will provide a security fence outside for the girls... So instead of the girls being locked in, they will be locked into a fenced area.”

The general secretary of the World YWCA, Kenyan Musimbi Kanyoro, called for debate on the security measures while the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre slammed the policy, saying it was widespread across the South Pacific.

“Is this not a question of the safety and security of women and girls? How do we join the people of Tuvalu in mourning the untimely death of these our sisters? We can speak to this issue to the whole world and intensify our efforts to make the world safe for women and girl,” Kanyoro said.

The Fiji group said many hostels in the Pacific locked girls in.

“Some boarding schools through their puritanical and out-dated ideas of female chastity lock girls up so they do not get up to mischief. It is utterly shameful and condemnatory of this world that in this day and age we have to lock up young girls, that women have to make prisoners of themselves not only because of the constant threat of violence but because of society’s blatant discrimination with regard to adolescent sexuality.”

But as the island nation mourned, a former teacher described the school as an “environment of para-military penalism.”

Stockholm teacher John French, who worked at the school in 1998, said it had 600

students between the ages of 13 and 21 and they were segregated by sex.

The pupils were “expected to leam a range of subjects from an elementary to a fairly high level in an environment of para military penalism where their own culture is devalued or ignored in favour of a culture that they will almost certainly never meet on it’s own terms,” he said.

“Their needs are largely ignored in a situation full of stress and competition that is in direct contrast to their own background.

“The low quality of the buildings, the bureaucracy, insufficient books and tools for the students, combined with the lack of pedagogic direction, archaic attitudes and careerism of the teachers and political leaders, are major stumbling blocks in the way of improving the general competence of the majority of students.” French, an English and economics teacher, was sent by the Swedish Polynesian Friendship Society to work at the school and his report on the experience was published on Hawaii’s East- West Center Pacific Islands Report (http://pidp.ewc.hawaii.edu/pireport/).

“As the school is run on the archaic principals and value systems of English boarding schools this means that the Tuvaluan student must radically change their modes and patterns of behaviour to conform to a cultural pattern imposed upon them by outside forces,” he reported.

“This often leads to traumatic

experiences during the adjustment period ...

and sows a seed of confusion in the mind of these young children.”

The school was established in 1923 by a New Zealand teacher, Donald Kennedy, who French described as “a brilliant innovator and administrator but unfortunately also a militaristic sadist who beat his students with a cricket bat. “The influence of Kennedy can still be felt in the running of Motufoua Secondary School to this day,” he said.

There were four houses in the school, and they were in competition with student life distorted by hunting for house points. “The students are forced to march to and from the

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dining room and the classrooms and this is also a chance to gain or lose points. In many ways the school is a parody of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’,” he said. Students at the school had their love of learning critically hampered. “Most of the teachers are palagi (white) and fall without question into the regime of para-military discipline imposed upon these innocent souls.” The headmaster

owned a lap-top computer which never left his side, while the school library was “a mish-mash of old discarded books left behind by previous volunteers, outdated text books and rotting magazines,” French said.

“Many of the books are utterly beyond the horizon of the students (The Intellectual Roots of Marxist Economic Thinking’) and just as many are an insult to their capabilities (The Peek a 800 Flower Book’).

“To find books that are useful is a possibility but usually there is only one copy and this makes it impossible to use the book for teaching purposes unless one has time to sit and copy the relevant sections 60 times by hand.” French said the text books were “pedagogically pathetic and totally devoid of humour and lack interesting examples that could stimulate the interest of the students.” ■