The Christian Church has long played a material role — going back to the emancipation of slaves in the 1830s — in the evolutionary development of a viable Jamaica.

The newly freed slaves received no compensation for centuries of brutal exploitation, unlike their former owners, who were granted huge sums by the British Government in return for loss of their human property.

Impoverished and without hope, many ex-slaves drifted away from the plantations or were evicted to survive as best they could — often squatting on Crown lands in the mountainous interior or drifting to the urban centres, some living on the streets and in shanty towns.

For many ex-slaves, Christian denominations became their saviour, assisting them to secure land on which were established so-called free villages across rural Jamaica.

Such denominations would play an equally far-reaching role in the establishment of schools to serve the children and grandchildren of slaves in the decades after Emancipation. Indeed, available evidence suggests that the Church, not the British colonial Government, led the way in educating the children of the poorest Jamaicans in the decades after slavery ended.

To this day, Church denominations such as the Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and Roman Catholics are dominant in Jamaican education. Others such as the Seventh-day Adventists have also played a strong role in more recent times.

No surprise then, that Church leaders are gravely concerned at behavioural problems in schools that have led to serious injuries, even death, as students returning to face-to-face study after the novel coronavirus fall-out, struggle to readjust.

Not that the current problems are new. Many older Jamaicans can remember their school days, decades ago, when minor disputes among students sometimes turned ugly and deadly.

Nor is preoccupation with the occult new. Guard rings may be a relatively novel manifestation, but obeah or ‘sciance’, as it is often called in the folk culture, is embedded deep, affecting the behaviour, mental and emotional state of many Jamaicans, including the young.

A basic truth that everyone can embrace is that violence and superstitious belief systems, etc, didn’t appear in schools without basis.

As Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kingston Kenneth Richards reminds us: “Children live what they learn,” and “actions speak louder than words”, and “hence our children are mimicking what they observe” being practised by adults all around them.

It stands to reason, then, that simply trying to resolve such problems by dealing with the children in school won’t sustainably work, since the fundamental problem is in the homes and communities from which they come.

This newspaper believes that, just as their predecessors built free villages and schools to lift poor people in the post-slavery era, modern church leaders can help people to find a way out of the impoverishment, ignorance, and hopelessness which trigger much of the crime and other social ills now haunting the society.

We have repeatedly argued in this space that thorough, deliberate, mobilisation of people in our poorest communities to help themselves — with grass roots leadership training at the core — can be part of a long-term solution to Jamaica’s problems.

Government should lead the way, but also, the Church should be right there, in sync with its glorious past.