Three Factors Overlooked Against Corporal Punishment in Suburban Schools

Tears welled up in his eyes. It was his third week at school in a pre-nursery class with many other children of low-income earners from the neighbouring villages. Like his class fellows, he had been struggling to learn the first few letters of English alphabet but without much profit. That morning was a frosty one with icy currents of wind piercing through his fragile and partially covered skin. A tattered sweater with sleeves refusing any cover below his elbows revealed much of his attire, all stained and soiled. His pants bore almost every shade of the world, completely weathered and grazed against the ragged piece of ground he had to sit on every day for his six hours of education with Master Zaka. The tears trickled down his cheeks as he struggled to resettle himself over his feet and crouched down on his knees adjusting his slate between his chest and over his knee caps for dictation. The sturdy hand of master Zaka had landed hard on his neck for having written ‘a’ the wrong way around. But the master was not satisfied with the first blow since it didn’t soothe his wrath. So there came the next one right on the boy’s parched cheeks with a loud clunk. It had dismantled all his alignments with lines and curves of the English alphabet. Every other letter on his slate zoomed up utterly alien to his tear-filled eyes. He had to force his hand to try out the right version of ‘a’ before being hit again. Not sure whether the new thing he wrote on his slate was actually an ‘a’ or not, he frisked his skinny fingers around another letter that master zaka had just pronounced for dictation as he slouched away along the next row of students perhaps having found a new victim.

This is just a snapshot of a rather bizarre ill-treatment dealt out to students in all state schools across Pakistan. A teacher taking immediate plunge into aggression against students for any glitch in behavior itself proves his complete unawareness to intermediate stages in behavior management and coaching. Besides all apparent implications, this recurrent recourse to adopting punishment as a means to teaching ‘effectively’ has some traumatic effects on innocent souls, especially from grade five and below. Although employed as a corrective measure by the teacher and in the very right mind, corporal punishment remains a deterrent against learning.

Run mainly on the crumbs of state budget and aided inadequately by the charity and funds raised locally, the elementary schools in the suburbs of unprivileged towns in Pakistan hold pertinent evidence to this deterrence in action. The whole set-up of such schools and their desultory engagement with policy run contrary to the propositions of law phrased under Article 25A, which affirms that it is necessary for every government to ensure free and quality education for citizens between 5 to 16 years of age. Whereas students going to such low-income-scheme elementary schools are exempted from fee and any particular outfits in the name of uniform, their famished stomachs churn up utter dissimilation with education being dished out.

Primary education is meant to constitute an inclusive framework of interest in learning during the formative years of a child’s schooling. However this prerequisite stands utterly ignored. The teachers’ lot appointed to serve this end is either ill-trained or completely demotivated. They seem eagerly pleased to set corporal punishment as their primary resolve to hoard the students into their desired patterns of discipline and education. This run-of-the-mill approach grinds down the student’s interest in education to the bare minimum; their punishment fright does the rest of the job, and ultimately they opt leaving the schools as a final step to nowhere.

What comes about as an alarming fact is that a big chunk of child population from primary schools in Pakistan drops out only to do the menial jobs at restaurants, mechanical shops or as street vendors. Pakistan suffers the highest dropout rate from schools at primary level and beyond. Research figures endorse that 42% of girls and 40% of boys drop out of primary school every year. The UNICEF report goes a step further and affirms that annually 10.7 million boys and 8.6 million girls are enrolled at primary level. However this figure radically drops down to 3.6 million boys and 2.8 million girls at lower secondary level.

With this whopping rate of dropouts from schools, and much of that happening at primary level, our educational horizon looks pretty bleak and unpromising. Corporal punishment has yet been quite instrumental in instituting such dropouts in schools despite the legislation adopted against it which states:

2) Notwithstanding anything contained in section 89 of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860 (Act XLV of 1860) and any other law for the time being in force, corporal punishment of child by any person is prohibited in all its forms, in schools and other educational institutional including formal and non-formal, both public and private, in child care institutions, and in the juvenile justice system.

Let’s dive a bit deeper and look for the reasons operating behind this element of corporal punishment.

1. If it’s okay at home, it’s damn well okay at school too!!!

Even weeks before a child from the poor suburbs puts his first step across the school threshold, he or she feels heavily brainwashed against a particular teacher at school who is believed to be a champion in caning children into submissiveness and discipline. Parents themselves become complicit in airing this fright further, thereby making school itself emerge as a prison in the child’s mind. Discounting the laborious effort involved in luring the child towards the school campus, the teacher’s hostile reception of such an unwilling kid does the rest of the job. What follows is a perpetual sense of fear and trauma that remain consistent as long as the child witnesses punishment either happening around him or bears it upon his own body. Parents’ allowance for this to happen ultimately precipitates the phenomenal dropouts from schools.

2. Low Income Profile-A Handy Excuse

According to the figures put up by the Business Recorder, percentage of poverty in Pakistan calculated to be 31.3% in 2018 is likely to touch 40% by the end of 2020. This data coincides well with the current statistics and signals an evident growth in poverty population from 69 million to 89 million people. Poverty, which in itself is a punishment, looms large over a big chunk of population and makes the legislation against corporal punishment look horrendously out of place in school context. People feel utterly indisposed sending their kids to schools because that sounds like adding an extra and an unwanted liability to their crippled finances. Teachers appointed in such low-income-scheme schools come from the same poverty stratum, and feel justified in unleashing their wrath upon kids as an excuse against poverty and low pay-scales.

3. Pygmalion Effect Gone Wrong

The problematic state of affairs runs deep into our culturally challenged system of education. In so much as the social imperatives hold education utterly necessary for an all-round reform, the educational constructs brew up high expectations that remain unmet by majority of kids below primary level. This phenomenon goes a long way to defy Pygmalion Effect, which primes setting high expectations as a key to achieving better results. The primary schools situated in the far-off hinterlands of neglected suburbs of Pakistan are too ill-equipped to meet any plausible standards, and ultimately produce good enough excuse for toil-beaten teachers to thrash the kids.