Shivam Vij
“If one seeks to remove violence from everyday life, the place to begin should be the classroom”
September 5 was Teacher’s Day, a day when students go to school and present their teachers with gifts and cards, and soberly smile at speeches about the greatness of every teacher in school. Amongst other things, oiled canes disappear on this day, only to be back the next day.
On August 3, Class v students Halima, Anushree, and Bilkis were playing in Howrah’s Sarenga High School. Their classmate Sohail joined them, and later fell down and hurt his head. Sohail’s version of the event, as reported to teacher Suresh Chandra Maity was that the three girls had deliberately banged his head against the wall. The 48-year-old Maity, who taught history, devised a medieval way to find out which of the three girls was the culprit. He told them to hold in their hands burning balls of fire. Whoever dropped it first, he ruled, would be the guilty one. Anushree and Bilkis dropped them, but Halima Khatun froze in fright and clutched it hard in her fist, severely burning her hand until the wrist. Still unmoved, Maity made the three girls wait for an hour and a half in the teachers’ room, without giving them first aid. When her mother Anwara Begum arrived, Halima Khatun did not even cry. Halima is the first child in the family to go to school. She does not want to return.
It is not just Halima for whom Teacher’s Day must seem like a cruel joke this year, there are many more.
“Such extreme violence in the name of corporal punishment clearly indicates that the teacher in question was personally unstable and took out his frustration on students,” says Pratibha Dua, counsellor at Delhi’s Gargi Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya. On 24 July at the Viraniya Secondary School in Gujarat’s Lunawada town, 14-year-old Pravin Pagi couldn’t answer some questions put to him by teacher Prafull Patel and he was beaten mercilessly. The student went home limping, and succumbed to injuries two days later in hospital. Cases like these seem as though the teacher overstepped the accepted limit of punishment and got carried away. But such is the nature of violence.
The Childline India Foundation runs a ‘child helpline’ where a student or parent call up the toll free number 1098 from anywhere in India and ask for help. “We regularly get calls from children complaining about corporal punishment. Chandigarh tops the number of complaints and in Delhi, South Delhi gets the most phone calls,” says Gargi Saha, Childline’s Senior Programme Co-ordinator. “We take the child in confidence and our childline workers meet him/her and try to get the whole story,” says Saha, “Then we go to the school principal in question, with a letter from government authorities, often maintaining the child’s request for anonymity.” The principals and teachers invariably refuse to admit that any such incident ever took place.
Examples of extreme violence in news give the impression that these are extreme aberrations. Teachers insist on the dictum, spare the rod and spoil the child. They say that mild punishment is important for maintaining discipline in the classroom. But campaigners against corporal punishment insist that even the mildest of corporal punishment — hitting with a ruler, making a student do sit-ups — can be counterproductive.
There are counsellors in schools for students, but the extreme cases suggest that even teachers need counselling. “Oh certainly,” says Saha, “Which is why we have been organising discussions with teachers as part of the government’s National Initiative for Child Protection. Initially their response in such seminars is: so you’ve come here to teach us? but gradually they come about to see our point and we set some introspection in motion.”
Surveys have shown that a majority of parents approve of some amount of physical punishment, but the same parents rush to fight with school principals and file firs when a case turns extreme. Not surprisingly, an all-India survey of case of corporal punishment by the Educational Research Centre showed that 50 percent fathers find corporal punishment acceptable, as against 30 percent mothers. The survey said that there are anywhere between 700 to a 1,000 reported severe cases but not even one per cent of the teachers are punished. What is worse, more students in the bracket of 6-12 years are punished than those above 12 years of age.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child asks all signatories, India included, to ensure that school discipline is maintained in such a manner that the dignity of children is not affected. States have been banning corporal punishment, either by themselves or due to court orders. In Tamil Nadu, it took the suicide of a 16-year-old Chennai boy to make corporal punishment illegal. The Delhi government refused to outlaw corporal punishment even when the parents of 12-year-old Nitin Rai went to court in 2000. Nitin lost 20 percent of his vision in the right eye after a teacher flung a duster at him. The Delhi government said that “isolated incidents of misuse cannot form the ground to strike down” corporal punishment, which was allowed under the Delhi School Education Act (1973). The High Court forced the Act to be amended.
Corporal punishment remains by and large politically correct: which is why the draft, a proposed law to protect children says that the act of “minor beating… which is in the interest of the child himself/herself, which is not of a persistent or a habitual nature,” shall not be considered corporal punishment. But “minor beating” can become major in the perception of the child. The greatest reason why we must oppose even ‘minor’ corporal punishment as a society is because the practice legitimises in young minds the use of violence as a means to an end. If one seeks to remove the use of violence from everyday lives, the place to begin with should be the classroom, where the teacher who wields unquestionable authority should wear the authority easily on his or her sleeves, wielding it without the stick. Teachers will then be able to teach Gandhi’s non-violence with a straight face, and the Teacher’s Day cards would just about begin to be heartfelt.
