After a decade of promoting anger management and dispute resolution in Jamaica’s schools, the PALS initiative disclosed yesterday that it would broaden its focus to the wider society.

“We are shifting our strategy and will be changing the name from Peace and Love in Schools to Peace and Love in Society to reflect the broader outreach programme that we are carrying out,” PALS Jamaica chairman, Morin Seymour, told the Observer after a worship service at Sts Peter and Paul Church, Old Hope Road, Kingston to launch Pals Peace Day 2004.

Peace Day will be observed tomorrow with a function at King’s House, the official residence of the governor-general in the capital.

During the service, Seymour told the congregation that after 10 years of promoting peace and love in schools, there was still the need to teach students how to control their anger and how to disagree without making others angry.

“Teachers still need to teach more discipline in schools, as discipline is still poor after 10 years in the programme,” he said. The programme, he argued, needed to be taken into homes where it would be used to restore order in the communities.

Explaining the shift, Seymour said the idea was to link parent and child in a very dynamic way, as there was evidence that children were making the change dynamically. Therefore, to create a harmonious community, it was paramount that parents accepted the change as well.

“It will have a positive impact on the public because the new initiative will be picking up where the other (pals) group left off,” he explained, pointing out that it also had implications for national development, because once order was restored to the communities, the focus could be placed on economic development.

In his interview with the Observer after the church service, however, Seymour gave a contrasting assessment of the level of discipline in schools.

“Oh, discipline has improved in schools,” he responded to a request to expand on his earlier statement. “There is a total transformation of discipline in schools nationally. Indiscipline in schools is not pervasive, it is the exception rather than the rule.”

In his homily, Monsignor Kenneth Mock Yen hailed Pals Jamaica for its peace and love initiative and said that the change in focus was coming at an appropriate time. “Reports are that at some schools, parents come to fight off the teachers for reprimanding the child,” Mock Yen said. “Jamaica has become a last lick society, so the introduction of Peace and Love in Society is an appropriate time for it to happen.”

The priest said that students were not at peace and lacked learning ability because of the noisy society, and warned them to put a mental block on noise around them, to spend more time reading books rather than playing video games which teach revenge rather than conflict resolution.

Mock Yen also called on the society not to demonstrate vengeance but rather to focus on children and marginalised folks.