Earlier this month, an incident came to the front in Greece. A 16 year old girl from Bulgaria -living in Greece- was raped by four of her male-classmates inside her school -in the toilettes- while two girls were recording everything with their cell-phone cameras. One cannot imagine what has been said over this, through media, public authorities and mouth2mouth discussions. Some ended up saying it was her fault, that she was the one to provoke them, so she "needed" it.
I really don't know how to react. Apart from the violation of her rights as a human - with her picture in some newspapers and on some TV programmes and everything happening in a closed community (it was in a region of Greece called Evia) - the school's first decision was to expell all of them from classes for 5 days. As if that would put things to place for the girl and the rest of students. The fact that they reformed the decision, doesn't change the situation.
When we say "we have an educational system", what exactly do we mean?That we provide academic knowledge to our youth? What? Where exactly is the social education? Shouldn't we do something towards that direction, instead of teaching only how to solve mathematical problems, what happened when and how we spell the words? Our children are growing up without knowledge of their rights, their body, even their mind and its power. Nobody teaches them that they should respect anothers opinion and way of life, they are taught that they are RIGHT and the rest are WRONG. They cannot have arguments because they were never taught how to think for themselves and be able to judge what they see.
I am determined to find a way to change that. I 'm already trying - being an educator - to achieve that. It might take two or three lifetimes, but I 'll manage.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and please send me your views.