As the principal of a school of nearly 2,000 students, Esther Tyson should be grateful that she found two students among the 115 surveyed as reported in her February 1 column, who were honest enough to say they found Rampin Shop by Vybz Kartel and Spice to be enticing and entertaining.

If the administrators at Ardenne High School believe that more than 95 per cent of the students were giving an honest denunciation of the song, as against presenting what they believe their teachers or principal wanted from them, then they are naive in the extreme and woefully unaware of what is happening among young people in Jamaica.

Appeal to adolescents

The things which many adults deplore as slackness and the various allusions to sex - whether implied or overt - have long appealed to adolescents just discovering their sexuality.

This is nothing new. More than 30 years ago, when I was in second form in high school, a visit to the bathroom would reveal crude drawings of couples having sex, with equally graphic language describing the action.

I can endorse the point, however, that the crude and raw language used in the production is unsuitable for general public consumption over the airwaves.

Cannot ban creativity

But we should not believe that banning certain kinds of music prevents students and young people's access to the material.

You cannot ban people's creative imagination. Besides, all of that young people know the ins and outs of sex in all its graphic and vulgar language far more than we care to acknowledge.

Also, Kartel and Spice are perhaps displaying a kind of arrested development that, as adults, causes them to find it entertaining to engage in adolescent-type descriptions of sexual intercourse. But that is beside the point.

The answer to "vulgarity and filth" is not for well-meaning adults to engage in denunciation and condemnation, but to teach their children and wards wholesome values in a frank and open way, that even when morsels of moral poison are presented to them, they are not enticed and will make right choices.

Those are choices they will have to make throughout life.

Choice still an option

I gather from her writings that Mrs Tyson is an ardent Christian. Surely, she would be aware that even in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, God did not take away the option of choice from Adam and Eve and neither can we in our more modern times.

That may be distressing to contemplate - but that is reality.

I am, etc.,

C. BARNSWELL

barnswellc@yahoo.co.uk

Kingston 6