Daily Times

According to the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, around 35,000 high school students in Pakistan drop out of primary and high school education system annually due to corporal punishment

The modern research has proved that corporal punishment is detrimental to a child’s physical dignity, mental health and academic engagement. Yet it continues to be increasingly administered in our schools for academic activities and for eliciting behavioral compliance. Of late, it has brought in its wake fatal encounters, sending chills down the spine of Pakistan.

Recently, a teacher physically tortured Hafiz Hunain Bilal, a student of class 10 of the American Lycetuff School, Lahore. According to the available information, the victim’s failure to memorise a computer-learning task gave the licence to an irritated teacher to brutalise the boy. The computer teacher, Kamran-better to call hima torturer-punched the victim repeatedly, grabbed his hair, and hit his head against the wall, resulting in the boy collapsing. Hunain died in his classroom.

In January, a student of class four of the Government Boys’ High School, Sahoowali, Chamraggan, tehsil Sialkot, was subjected to severe physical torture by his teacher. The boy succumbed to injuries in hospital.

In April 2019, a private schoolteacher was booked for torturing a schoolboy of class nine in Lahore.

And who can forget cadet Mohammed Ahmed Husain Mashori, another victim of campus cruelty? In 2016, a student of the Cadet College, Larkana, was brutally beaten by his teacher. The beating left him paralysed as certain bones around the neck and windpipe were damaged. Or Mudassir of the Government Boys’ High School, Hyderabad, who in 2014 after having done one hundred sit-ups developed an abdominal pain resulting in death.

The recent tragic death of Hunain, caused by classroom violence in Lahore, and other cases highlighted here, throw light on the murky school environment our new generation is grappling with. A student’s failure to memorise something, bring a new notebook, or pay school fee on time fuels teachers’ fury, resulting in classroom violence.

The main problem is the ‘teacher-centred approach to learning’ applied in our education system

Child violence is weaved into the fabric of society; parents punish their children over trivial issues, senior siblings strong-arm /bully their juniors, and teachers give physical punishment to pupils in their care. This is why most of us have been a victim of this violence, either of parental punishment or classroom cruelty at some stage. There can be a few exceptions.

Historically, the justification for physical punishment comes from the doctrine ‘in loco parent is’, whereby teachers are considered authority figures, granted the same rights as parents to punish children in their care. According to this frame of mind, physical punishment given by a teacher is the key to unlock academic improvement. But modern psychologists and pediatrics have nullified such notions, stating that it negatively impacts both the social life and academic achievement of students.

Internationally recognised consequences of corporal punishment:

(1)Corporal punishment can lead to lifelong psychological damage, such as depression, inhibition, rigidity, heightened anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

(2)Corporal punishment causes children to lose interest in learning; children learn the learning experience and, as a result, do not value education.

(3)Children learn to hate a subject or teacher. Education doesn’t thrive when children live in fear of those who teach them.

(4) School absenteeism and dropout increase. Children lose interest and develop a negative attitude toward education and learning.

(5) Children accept it as a practice of dealing with conflict among fellow students.

The American Society for Adolescent Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics are on the same page with regard to destructive developmental outcomes of the classroom violence elaborated above. Nusrut Habib Rana , a Pakistani psychiatrist, joined the chorus of concern, convincingly commenting that “exposure to the punishment in question during childhood can lead to depression, which in turn may lead to aggressive behavior and suicidal tendencies and/or drug addiction.”

Recently, a student of a private school in Karachi was, reportedly, hit with a pencil by his class fellow, damaging the eye, and subsequently, blinding him in that eye. There are reports that Lahore’s American Lycetuff School children, on the heels of Hunain’s tragic death, tried to set the school on fire, timely foiled by the police.

Those reared and taught in a violent environment cannot be expected to be behaving otherwise.

According to the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, an Islamabad-based NGO, around 35,000 high school students in Pakistan drop out of primary and high school education system annually due to corporal punishment.

The main problem is the ‘teacher-centred approach to learning’ applied in our education system. According to this tool of teaching, teachers are the main authority figures. Students are viewed as ’empty vessels’ whose primary role is to passively receive information via lectures and direct instruction. Passive learning kills students’ creativity. Mere memorisation of the course being taught to students has burdened them beyond imagination, thus killing their cognitive capacity. “Education is when the mind expands, not when the mind memorises.”

The writer is an educationist and a freelance contributor