A good article on corporal punishment being used by school teachers as a form of discipline. I'm personally in favour of corporal punishment but within, some bounds.
The article does try to put it into a proper perspective that "blaming specific groups (teachers, &/or parents) will not enable progress to be made, & risks alienating teachers already under pressure because of overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure, & poverty situations."
Beating children because they are poor or being absent from class because they have to provide help in the family farms or not having proper school supplies due to poverty is definitely wrong.
But beating children because they are cheating on the test/exam (that is not "teamwork") or they have not done their homework or they are late to class/school are very plausible reasons to punish students. However, if those children didn't do homework because of lack of school supplies or came late because of a family emergency, then they must not be punished.
Corporal punishment make the children know that teacher is to be respected. Being of a Pakistani background, I know the experience of corporal punishment, first hand. After moving to Canada in my teens, I was aghast at watching how students in secondary school talked back to teachers. Teachers have little to no respect in the eyes of students in the West, except a few good students.
On top of that, I was reading an article a few months back (I may have even wrote a blog post on it) that how teachers, in North American elementary to secondary schools, are always afraid of their students, that when & who may allege something against them to the school authorities.
There was an example that how a elementary school substitute teacher saw a student throw away a perfectly good banana in the garbage during lunch hour. The teacher told the student to take the banana out of the garbage & eat it. The student took it out & took 1 bite of the banana, & then threw it back in the garbage. This all happened while he kept staring back at the teacher, like challenging her back. The incident didn't stop there. The student went home & told his parents that the teacher forced him to eat the fruit from the garbage. Parents, of course, stormed the principal's office. Consequently, the teacher got suspended while the matter was investigated. Although, no charge was ever laid against her for child abuse, she was never called back again to teach at that school. After all, which school administration would want to go through the whole hassle of investigation against such a teacher who was merely teaching a student the value of food & discouraging him from wasting food?
Corporal punishment is being removed from schools around the world. One of my maternal aunts in Pakistan, who is a secondary school teacher for around 20 years now & is highly respected, was decrying back in December 2013 that teachers are being banned from using corporal punishment as a form of disciplining the children. Her school is a network of private schools in Karachi & kids from middle to upper middle class attend that school (so not exactly poor kids who need to help out their families in the farms are attending that school). She was saying that school children are becoming more & more brave & talk back to teachers & don't listen to what teachers are saying because they know that teachers can't touch them now.
I fully agreed with her. Because, I have seen the effects of how much respect teachers really have in North American schools. And, it's only getting worse. Teachers aren't allowed to discipline students. So, students have a free rein to do whatever they like, however they like, in whichever way they like. If they want to smoke & deal drugs right outside the school, who is going to stop them? If they want to start a fight in / around the school, who is going to stop them? If they want to bring a gun / other weapons to school, who is going to stop them? If they want to harass / bully another student(s), who is going to stop them? Definitely, not the teachers, because their hands are tied.
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Despite widespread concern about the effects of corporal punishment on children, it persists in schools across the world. Its eradication in many countries is proving difficult, & India is no exception.
... more everyday forms of violence may go unnoticed or unquestioned, & limited academic attention has focused on gender differences in the way punishment is meted out to boys & girls at home, school, & society at large. For children in many parts of India, norms relating to femininity mean that girls are required to be docile & submissive, & not to be “naughty”. Ideas about masculinity may mean that boys are supposed to be able to accept physical punishment & to withstand pain.
India ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, & has many policies that ban corporal punishment in schools. But these seem out of kilter with everyday realities. The Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act of 2009 guarantees school for all children between the ages of 6 & 14. Although elementary schooling has expanded, this rapid expansion has not been matched by comparable increases in the teaching workforce. There is a shortage of teachers across schools, & class sizes are very large, putting pressure on teachers to control high numbers of children.
The government of India commissioned research that included more than 3,000 children aged from 5 to 18, asking about physical abuse by teachers. In all age groups, 65% reported being beaten at school. Our own findings back up these figures. Younger children (aged 7–8) were significantly more likely to have witnessed & experienced corporal punishment than the 14- to 15-year-old cohort, with over two-thirds of the younger children having been physically punished at school in the past week, compared with one-third of the older young people. Poorer children were more likely than less poor children to be punished.
However, among children aged 14–15, we found that girls & boys alike experience routine corporal punishment, with boys experiencing particularly high levels. There was a less sharp distinction in use of corporal punishment between boys & girls in the younger cohort. This may be because corporal punishment is part of the socialisation of younger children, but when they are older it is no longer seen as an appropriate way to discipline young women, while “toughening up” young men may be normative.
It may be seen as part of boys’ socialisation & transition into adulthood. One 15-year-old boy complained about the unfairness of the beatings being meted out on boys, whom he perceived as being punished much more than girls. The violence children & young people experience in schools may not be visibly gendered but it may reinforce gender differentiation because of the ways in which it is employed by male & female teachers. Some children, for example, spoke of being particularly afraid of the male PE teachers. However, the reality is that young boys & girls alike are physically abused in schools, & it is being children that make them vulnerable, rather than their gender.
Reasons to be punished
Girls and boys spoke of a range of other reasons for punishment, including being absent from school due to work, illness or attending family celebrations, missing classes, not doing their homework, not reading well, making mistakes, receiving poor marks in exams, not wearing uniform, not having the right equipment, or not paying the teacher for extra lessons. One girl, aged 10, said:
“If we don’t study, they beat us. If we ask other children for help, they beat [us]. I went to drink water without asking sir, so he beat me that time. They said all children should come back to class by the time they count 10 after the interval. But I went home [to use the toilet]. After coming back to school, he beat me.”
Punished for poverty
Poverty at home also clearly influenced school discipline practices. Living in poverty meant that children were sometimes not in a position to follow the rules & expectations of school. Children described being punished for not having uniform or the right equipment, or money to pay fees.
...
As Young Lives data have shown, economic constraints & family circumstances mean that boys & girls in rural areas engage in seasonal agricultural work on family land, & miss school for days, weeks, or months at a time. Although the boys & girls did different gender-specific work, the impact was the same: when they did return to school, they faced punishment. Although older boys rarely spoke directly about their fears of punishment, their mothers spoke of their sons’ emotions. Ranadeep’s mother explained:
“Without him, we cannot run the family, we don’t get labourers & there is no other way for us. When he returns to school they shout at him & he is terrified ... His father goes there & informs them ... they scold us, they say ‘how will he get on if he is absent for such a long time?’... We try to pacify them by telling them about our problems at home.”
What can be done?
In global policy debates, much emphasis has been placed on the role of education as the solution not only to reducing cycles of poverty in developing countries, but also to addressing gender violence.
However, the evidence presented here suggests that we must question this, at least in the Indian context. All children, regardless of gender, experience high levels of physical violence in schools. But it is teenage boys who experience the most.
But blaming specific groups (teachers, &/or parents) will not enable progress to be made, & risks alienating teachers already under pressure because of overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure, & poverty situations.
Approaches need to develop not only from the top down, but from communities, families & teachers to find ways of working together to change practices.
Violence as an integral part of schooling may have consequences for boys’ & girls’ development that go beyond the here & now of childhood to social & economic factors in adulthood. In India, this needs to be understood in the context of the high expectations that parents & children have of schools. Some children dislike school for many reasons, but if they discontinue school because of their experience of corporal punishment, & if they learn that corporal punishment is the solution to behaviour that is out of line, then formal schooling may inadvertently be reinforcing both cycles of poverty & the use of violence.
Virginia Morrow is a senior research officer at Young Lives & a University of Oxford associate professor. Follow Young Lives on Twitter.
The article does try to put it into a proper perspective that "blaming specific groups (teachers, &/or parents) will not enable progress to be made, & risks alienating teachers already under pressure because of overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure, & poverty situations."
Beating children because they are poor or being absent from class because they have to provide help in the family farms or not having proper school supplies due to poverty is definitely wrong.
But beating children because they are cheating on the test/exam (that is not "teamwork") or they have not done their homework or they are late to class/school are very plausible reasons to punish students. However, if those children didn't do homework because of lack of school supplies or came late because of a family emergency, then they must not be punished.
Corporal punishment make the children know that teacher is to be respected. Being of a Pakistani background, I know the experience of corporal punishment, first hand. After moving to Canada in my teens, I was aghast at watching how students in secondary school talked back to teachers. Teachers have little to no respect in the eyes of students in the West, except a few good students.
On top of that, I was reading an article a few months back (I may have even wrote a blog post on it) that how teachers, in North American elementary to secondary schools, are always afraid of their students, that when & who may allege something against them to the school authorities.
There was an example that how a elementary school substitute teacher saw a student throw away a perfectly good banana in the garbage during lunch hour. The teacher told the student to take the banana out of the garbage & eat it. The student took it out & took 1 bite of the banana, & then threw it back in the garbage. This all happened while he kept staring back at the teacher, like challenging her back. The incident didn't stop there. The student went home & told his parents that the teacher forced him to eat the fruit from the garbage. Parents, of course, stormed the principal's office. Consequently, the teacher got suspended while the matter was investigated. Although, no charge was ever laid against her for child abuse, she was never called back again to teach at that school. After all, which school administration would want to go through the whole hassle of investigation against such a teacher who was merely teaching a student the value of food & discouraging him from wasting food?
Corporal punishment is being removed from schools around the world. One of my maternal aunts in Pakistan, who is a secondary school teacher for around 20 years now & is highly respected, was decrying back in December 2013 that teachers are being banned from using corporal punishment as a form of disciplining the children. Her school is a network of private schools in Karachi & kids from middle to upper middle class attend that school (so not exactly poor kids who need to help out their families in the farms are attending that school). She was saying that school children are becoming more & more brave & talk back to teachers & don't listen to what teachers are saying because they know that teachers can't touch them now.
I fully agreed with her. Because, I have seen the effects of how much respect teachers really have in North American schools. And, it's only getting worse. Teachers aren't allowed to discipline students. So, students have a free rein to do whatever they like, however they like, in whichever way they like. If they want to smoke & deal drugs right outside the school, who is going to stop them? If they want to start a fight in / around the school, who is going to stop them? If they want to bring a gun / other weapons to school, who is going to stop them? If they want to harass / bully another student(s), who is going to stop them? Definitely, not the teachers, because their hands are tied.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite widespread concern about the effects of corporal punishment on children, it persists in schools across the world. Its eradication in many countries is proving difficult, & India is no exception.
... more everyday forms of violence may go unnoticed or unquestioned, & limited academic attention has focused on gender differences in the way punishment is meted out to boys & girls at home, school, & society at large. For children in many parts of India, norms relating to femininity mean that girls are required to be docile & submissive, & not to be “naughty”. Ideas about masculinity may mean that boys are supposed to be able to accept physical punishment & to withstand pain.
India ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, & has many policies that ban corporal punishment in schools. But these seem out of kilter with everyday realities. The Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act of 2009 guarantees school for all children between the ages of 6 & 14. Although elementary schooling has expanded, this rapid expansion has not been matched by comparable increases in the teaching workforce. There is a shortage of teachers across schools, & class sizes are very large, putting pressure on teachers to control high numbers of children.
The government of India commissioned research that included more than 3,000 children aged from 5 to 18, asking about physical abuse by teachers. In all age groups, 65% reported being beaten at school. Our own findings back up these figures. Younger children (aged 7–8) were significantly more likely to have witnessed & experienced corporal punishment than the 14- to 15-year-old cohort, with over two-thirds of the younger children having been physically punished at school in the past week, compared with one-third of the older young people. Poorer children were more likely than less poor children to be punished.
However, among children aged 14–15, we found that girls & boys alike experience routine corporal punishment, with boys experiencing particularly high levels. There was a less sharp distinction in use of corporal punishment between boys & girls in the younger cohort. This may be because corporal punishment is part of the socialisation of younger children, but when they are older it is no longer seen as an appropriate way to discipline young women, while “toughening up” young men may be normative.
It may be seen as part of boys’ socialisation & transition into adulthood. One 15-year-old boy complained about the unfairness of the beatings being meted out on boys, whom he perceived as being punished much more than girls. The violence children & young people experience in schools may not be visibly gendered but it may reinforce gender differentiation because of the ways in which it is employed by male & female teachers. Some children, for example, spoke of being particularly afraid of the male PE teachers. However, the reality is that young boys & girls alike are physically abused in schools, & it is being children that make them vulnerable, rather than their gender.
Reasons to be punished
Girls and boys spoke of a range of other reasons for punishment, including being absent from school due to work, illness or attending family celebrations, missing classes, not doing their homework, not reading well, making mistakes, receiving poor marks in exams, not wearing uniform, not having the right equipment, or not paying the teacher for extra lessons. One girl, aged 10, said:
“If we don’t study, they beat us. If we ask other children for help, they beat [us]. I went to drink water without asking sir, so he beat me that time. They said all children should come back to class by the time they count 10 after the interval. But I went home [to use the toilet]. After coming back to school, he beat me.”
Punished for poverty
Poverty at home also clearly influenced school discipline practices. Living in poverty meant that children were sometimes not in a position to follow the rules & expectations of school. Children described being punished for not having uniform or the right equipment, or money to pay fees.
...
As Young Lives data have shown, economic constraints & family circumstances mean that boys & girls in rural areas engage in seasonal agricultural work on family land, & miss school for days, weeks, or months at a time. Although the boys & girls did different gender-specific work, the impact was the same: when they did return to school, they faced punishment. Although older boys rarely spoke directly about their fears of punishment, their mothers spoke of their sons’ emotions. Ranadeep’s mother explained:
“Without him, we cannot run the family, we don’t get labourers & there is no other way for us. When he returns to school they shout at him & he is terrified ... His father goes there & informs them ... they scold us, they say ‘how will he get on if he is absent for such a long time?’... We try to pacify them by telling them about our problems at home.”
What can be done?
In global policy debates, much emphasis has been placed on the role of education as the solution not only to reducing cycles of poverty in developing countries, but also to addressing gender violence.
However, the evidence presented here suggests that we must question this, at least in the Indian context. All children, regardless of gender, experience high levels of physical violence in schools. But it is teenage boys who experience the most.
But blaming specific groups (teachers, &/or parents) will not enable progress to be made, & risks alienating teachers already under pressure because of overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure, & poverty situations.
Approaches need to develop not only from the top down, but from communities, families & teachers to find ways of working together to change practices.
Violence as an integral part of schooling may have consequences for boys’ & girls’ development that go beyond the here & now of childhood to social & economic factors in adulthood. In India, this needs to be understood in the context of the high expectations that parents & children have of schools. Some children dislike school for many reasons, but if they discontinue school because of their experience of corporal punishment, & if they learn that corporal punishment is the solution to behaviour that is out of line, then formal schooling may inadvertently be reinforcing both cycles of poverty & the use of violence.
Virginia Morrow is a senior research officer at Young Lives & a University of Oxford associate professor. Follow Young Lives on Twitter.
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