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Summer of hope?

Photo: K.R. Deepak

No place for tears in a classroom...

The new academic year begins at schools and the motivation of this article is hope. As the year progresses through June to July, from the south of the country to the north, schools will be painted and cleaned, three-year-olds will grow excited about their first day of schooling, and older students will enter their classrooms with aspirations and resolutions. As if in contrast to this hope, there are the media reports that have brought to public attention the severe methods by which children in schools are coerced to learn and of the equally alarming ways in which some have responded to their lack of “success”.

The responses to the media reports have focussed on the disbelief and horror that the incidents have provoked, and have attempted to analyse the situations in a classroom that make students disorderly and a teacher resort to punishment. They have examined the role of fear in schools and asked for changes in school systems that are dependent on fear and authority. The responses have evoked the rights of a child and laws that ban corporal punishment. The responses have pertinently asked why, when no training colleges for teachers teach how to hit, no administrators and leaders endorse it, such coercive measures persist.

It must also be understood that often it is the most violent incidents that receive media attention and alarm the public into response. It is also in the nature of media and its “herd mentality” as it were, that there is sudden and loud attention for a period of time on an issue; a sense of panic, in this case a feeling that school related violence is on the rise; and then a silence as other incidents and issues demand attention.

This article is written with the hope that the questions raised will now be taken further in the places that matter — the schools. The article attempts to examine the nature of punishment and its effects and state that it has no place in schools. It asks for a long vision of education and suggests that only when children grow up in schools that are affectionate and caring can they create a safe and peaceful world.

The fundamental problem with punishment is that it has no relationship with the act that prompted it. There is no relationship between paying a fine at the school office and arriving late to school, between standing out and not knowing the multiplication tables. Punishment is always a reaction, mechanical or emotional; never a response with an attempt to understand. The irrationality of punishment is confusing and fearful. And from this confusion and fear grow feelings of anger, humiliation, inadequacy, sadness, and hatred. Such an atmosphere does not form a nurturing ground for learning in a school.

The problem with punishment is seen most starkly and accepted by most people when it is corporal punishment. It is believed that pain will prevent a child from repeating an action and set an example for others. What makes it right for a teacher to hurt with a look, compare one child with another, use harsh words, make a child run round the games field? What makes corporal punishment, these random and conscious acts of brutality, a prevalent and often unquestioned practice in schools? Does this kind of education really prepare a young person to live rightly and happily in the world? Does punishment in itself create permission for violence in society?

The common beliefs that are held of children and learning and the purpose of a school are extraordinarily limited. One belief is that students do not enjoy learning. Therefore, rather than work towards enjoyment and making meaning out of learning, the primary purpose of learning becomes scoring marks in the examinations for a future career. Classes in school are heavy with lessons, strategies for memory and the students’ time outside school is taken up with tuitions and homework. Learning becomes information presented to the students and in the classroom the teacher’s attention is on controlling students and maintaining order. Fear is the tool by which order is maintained so that this transfer of information can happen. Coercive structures are then built to motivate the students to learn — comparison, competition, reward and punishment.

Often it is believed that a school’s success is dependent on student performance in the examination. The pass percentage of a school and the number of “toppers” produced become a lure for more admissions and prosperity of the school. Pictures of toppers with the names of their schools have appeared in newspapers and magazines and on school gates and notice boards. At the same time the newspapers report that after weeks of the declaration of school results the student help-lines are still busy and now with a few days to go before schools and colleges reopen, we hear of students killing themselves for the marks and admissions they did not get. If these are the beliefs held, it follows that fear must become the tool of learning in a school; and punishment in pursuit of these goals becomes justified. If we do not trust that students enjoy learning, then coercive measures need to be used for what is believed must be done. The problem with punishment is that it teaches students to conform through fear. Punishment teaches children to be submissive and children who behave from fear are rarely able to take responsibility for their own actions and behaviour. In a classroom when a student is humiliated — asked to stand in a corner, shamed in words, or hit — the students who watch also become a part of the humiliation. They are expected to cooperate in the act and they usually do. It is common to see a child taunt another about the punishment that he will get. When students repeatedly see their classmates being hurt, and are at the same time unable to intervene, it is likely that they could grow indifferent to justice and pain. There are other questions that need to be asked: Would a child who has seen others frequently humiliated and beaten by teachers be able to bear witness and stand up against injustice and cruelty when she sees it? Could a student who allows himself to be hit be able to say “no” to another form of abuse on the next day? It is also possible that the degrading and humiliating use of punishment in schools is seen as a license for students to do the same. So it is argued that fear and punishment promotes bullying, ragging and cruelty among children.

Does punishment then promote a general disrespect for the child and abuse in the general society? It is in a school through their growing years that children learn about the world and about themselves, that they learn judgment, restraint, consideration for others and responsibility. So when children grow up in a punishing atmosphere and when they act from fear, this violence gets woven into the very fabric of society. We hear of extreme measures all around us all the time to resolve conflict — burning of trains, wreckage of public property, stabbing and killing, ragging and humiliating, taking one’s life. Where, when and how are children to learn that violence is not the best way of solving problems? Surely school education must have something to with all this.

I was sitting one evening with a group of thirteen year olds a day after the rain holidays in Chennai last November which had kept children indoors. It was at this time that the blasts in Mumbai happened. I asked them what it had left them feeling - having had to stay indoors and with twenty-four hour television coverage. The predominant feeling was fear. The pleasurable suspense and excitement: “I have always been interested in commando operations and I was very eager to find out what they were doing and how it would all end.” “It was like a game, I had to keep telling myself it was real and still I did not feel anything real.” Then there was fear and anxiety: What if it happened in my city? What would happen to my family? Finally, a very different fear: “The attackers were so young, only a few years older than me. What if I get sucked in?”

Yes, education in schools must concern itself with all this. (And schools are not the only places where children encounter violence. They encounter it at home, on television, in the computer games they play, in the news stories they read and watch.) Children need to find ways of understanding what is happening around them. They need to learn that violence is not the only way of resolving conflict. It is in places without threat that children can learn to question and find different ways of seeing — in conversation with their friends and teachers. Schools, we know, can be creative, affectionate and active places to learn and grow in, where teachers feel nurtured and the young do not feel ignored for who they are; and both experience well being and joy. When students are active in their learning in however small a manner the need to use fear to establish order is naturally reduced.

When teachers experience agency and the independence to bring about a change in the curriculum, to create a lesson plan anew, to discuss and affect a decision; then they are less likely to misuse their authority in the classroom. Finally, a school must see to it that each student experiences the opportunity to live right, to use his or her abilities, each according to his or her capacities. Then there is a less likelihood of going wrong.

To end, and just in case the urgency of the topic is forgotten, here is a moving image that a friend recalled. It was a class of young men and women of about 30 years working in offices and now learning a foreign language for an assignment abroad. As the instructor was walking among the group, he stopped inadvertently next to a young man. He flinched, shielded his head with his hand, and moved to a side, all in a flash. The instructor was taken aback and confused at the reaction of the young man. The problem with punishment is that its effects last a very long while.

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