THE "bag-em-and-tag-em" system of education is the Major Irritant of the Week. Here's a trivia question for Paula Cox: What made the bar in the television show Cheers special? Answer: It's a place where you can go where everybody knows your name.

I have a great respect for Education Minister Paula Cox. If someone were to give the Government an IQ test (and someone really should), Paula would win hands down. So I hold out great hope that she's going to put her brains to the task of sorting out the CedarBridge Academy mess.

I have cousins and friends at CedarBridge Academy. I spent two years volunteering there. The way the school stands now I'd move to another country before I'd allow my teenager (assuming I had one) attend CedarBridge Academy.

The facilities are wonderful: tennis courts, dance studio and a big auditorium, but the ratio of teachers to students is too great. Unlike Cheers, at CedarBridge Academy nobody knows your name.

You've seen the movies where people suddenly find themselves invisible? Doesn't the temptation to lie, cheat, steal suddenly become much greater when the character knows no one can see him? The students are misbehaving because they feel invisible. They have anonymity and they feel no accountability, a dangerous combination.

This was highlighted in a recent Letter to the Editor of TheRoyal Gazette from two teachers at CedarBridge Academy. They complained that students there don't carry identification cards. They try to discipline their students but, "Hey you, stop that! I'll call your parents as soon as I figure out who you are!" is surprisingly ineffective.

There are too many faces to memorise, the teachers say.

I don't recommend identification cards. They can be tampered with, lost and switched. How about a microchip in the ear like they do for cats? That way when a child misbehaves all you have to do is scan their ear to discover their identity. Or perhaps a big old radio-controlled collar around their necks and some electric fencing around the perimeter of the school? I call this the "bag-em-and-tag-em" system of education.

Not that the problem lies with the teachers at CedarBridge. They are trying to make the best out of a poor situation. The problem lies in the concept of CedarBridge Academy. It was created, not to improve the situation for local students, but to save money for the Government. It's cheaper in the long term to maintain one facility than several. To adjust that concept and admit some degree of failure means a massive loss of face for local politicians.

Last week the Reading Association brought down a Yale Professor, Dr. James Comer, who is an expert in child education and psychiatry. He came to talk about reading, but he is well known for designing an education programme which has turned around more than 700 schools in the United States, many of them inner-city schools. At the heart of his programme is the belief that personal relationships between teachers and students are critically important.

"That is a major problem," he said in last week's Mid-Ocean News. "The traditional approach to education amounts to pouring information down the throats of children particularly when you get past early elementary school. If you pay attention to the relationships that are necessary to support the development of young people, they will develop well and they will learn. In education we don't really address that. We often don't create conditions which will allow the kinds of relationships which are necessary."

His statements don't exactly lend credence to the "bag-em-and-tag-em" system, do they? How can you have a relationship with students if you don't know their name? "Hey you, I really care" sounds so cold. We need to find ways to make CedarBridge Academy a smaller, less populated and more cosy place. This could be done by breaking the school into several parts (it's big enough) with separate heads and teachers for each part: North Block Year One and Two, for example, and South Block Year Three and Four. The two groups wouldn't meet or mix because the whole idea is to form a smaller community with teachers able to pick a face out of the crowd.

The idea is to create a controlled environment. At the moment CedarBridge has posted security guards who check for hallway passes and computers to track the movements of students and they still have absolutely no control over their students. The students arrive in the morning and, despite all the security measures, have disappeared by lunch.

If we can't make CedarBridge Academy smaller then we need to create a third public secondary school, and a fourth, if necessary. We need to do whatever it takes to give our students an identity and a sense of empowerment. But then, I'm just a journalist. Let's get an educational expert like Dr. Comer brought back here so we can find out about his programme for educational reform.

I'm looking forward to some action from Ms Cox. No more hogwash and loopty-looing around. Let's get this problem fixed. These are our kids.

And let's set a deadline for whatever solution she comes up with. If behaviour and academic performance don't improve in X amount of time, then we stop and change our approach. We don't wait decades to decide the system is failing.