skills, says Shadow Education Minister Ms Jennifer Smith.

Speaking yesterday to the Hamilton Lions Club, Ms Smith reminded her audience of the "charm schools'' of the past and said that schools supplemented home training "even back in the good old days''.

"I find it amazing that now, when the need is even greater, there are no longer charm schools,'' said Ms Smith, who is also Deputy Leader of the Opposition Progressive Labour Party.

"I've heard people say that young people today lack home training, giving the impression that certain social skills should be taught in the home,'' she said. "Yet, I remember when young ladies in particular used to go to charm school to learn how to walk, how to sit, how to hold a tea cup.

"If people could make money from teaching those social skills in the good old days, it is obvious they were not being taught in the home. The difference is, then, there was somewhere to go to learn.'' But Bermuda today must look to the schools to teach children more than just charm, Ms Smith said. "It is a shameful fact of life in Bermuda today that teachers are sometimes the only constant in a child's life,'' she said.

"School is the only place of safety and refuge.

"Not to acknowledge the fact that Bermuda's social ills have placed both a strain and a responsibility on our education system is to deny the obvious.

"Continuing to try to place the responsibility back on the shoulders of parents who are either incapable, through their own misfortune, or who are just not able, for whatever reason, serves no purpose when the whole of society is affected.'' Having agreed earlier in her speech with an editorial in Monday's The Royal Gazette which said education instills values that Bermudians carry through their lives, Ms Smith then parted ways with the editorial, which laid much of the fault on "the misconceived education system which rewards failure''.

Ms Smith said it was society that paid the price for such failures, and "society must come up with the solutions''.

"Indeed, if we really believed that bad parenting is responsible for some of the problems we see today, then we as a society are responsible, by omission, for not insisting that parenting skills be included in the education curriculum,'' she said.

Nor was the problem simply a lack of discipline, she said. Many students who displayed aggression and anti-social behaviour were suffering from stress directly related to problems in their homes.

Both the Archibald Report on drugs and alcohol and the report of the Education Planning Team recommended a school drugs programme, hiring of an adolescent drugs counsellor, and rehabilitation, Ms Smith said. Yet those programmes "are just now in the process of being set up, years after these reports''.

Children are "facing serious problems'' and certified clinical psychologists trained to deal with them are needed in the schools, she said.