On Corporal Punishment > IDEAS & IDEALS

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One of my college friends, a highschool English teacher, is very unhappy these days for being forbidden to punish his students physically at school by a special order from the Ministry of Education. He is even very angry and bitterly sarcastic as well as sardonic about the mandate and about its consequences. Without corporal punishment, he says, there is no way to keep so many fun-seeking, mischievous, disobedient, misbehaving, distracting students in order and under control at school. Those people in the position who made the decision, he says, simply don't understand the educational reality in the classroom. The said friend of mine is a gentle person, poet, loving father and husband, and able teacher with more than 25 years of teaching experience. He is in his late 50's. 
 
     The general reaction of the school teachers shown above to the ministerial order is quite understandable. For many teachers in this country who take the physical punishment for granted, who think and regard it as a necessity and a right, it must be a mixed feeling of shock, embarrassment, disappointment, guilt, shame, and anger. Indeed, since school education began in our country "the corporal punishment," a euphemism for "beating," has become a very important part of the education, and it has been accepted and endorsed by the teachers, parents and the students themselves as an inevitable, indispensable, necessary, and one of the most effective ways of teaching and learning.  

      Naturally, therefore, we were beaten often and frequently for many and various reasons and causes. We were beaten when we did not do our homework properly, when we were late for the class, when we were absent from school, when we did not pay good attention to the lesson, when we talked in the classroom, when the result of the exam came out bad and poor, when we went to the movie without permission, when we were caught in dozing or in sleeping during the class. We were beaten for cheating in the exam, for being disobedient to the teachers, for being too fashionable and conspicuous in wearing the school uniform. We were beaten for wearing too long pants and sometimes for too short ones, for too loose pants and sometimes for too tight ones.  

      Smashing on the head with the hard and stiff cover of the name-roll book was one of the favorite and mild forms used habitually by the teachers. We were often told to stretch our two hands and got whipped on the palms with a wooden stick. Slapping hard on the cheeks and in the face came next, and punching on any part of the body above the stomach, including the head, with the clenched fist was also very common and frequent. Sometimes we were told to make a push-up position on the floor and got beaten on the buttocks with a wooden club. When a teacher got really mad, he lost his head, and used anything, - hand, leg, fist, stick, club, or any object around in the world he could see, find, or lay his hands on. Sometimes we were beaten almost to death. We went home bleeding, but unlike the boys these days, we did not tell on the tormentors. we went to sleep, and returned to school in the morning as if nothing had happened.

      It is quite natural for our teachers, who grew up, was bred up, and taught in this ethos of violence, to perpetrate and perpetuate it in their turn without a scintilla of shame or guilt, and to be greatly embarrassed to be told all of a sudden to stop it once for all. Like the slave-masters from whose hand the whip is taken away, the teachers may well feel empty and powerless before the students, and will find a great difficulty in adjusting themselves to the new situation. It is quite understandable for them to be so reluctant and slow in relinquishing their grip on their time-honored whip.

      Then, what shall we do? I hear they ask in anger and protest. Are you saying that we should just let them go as they want to do? Let them sleep during the class? Let them talk freely during the lesson? Let them play chess, play cards, play soccer in the classroom? Do nothing to the students who deliberately and intentionally disturb and distract the lesson, and provoke the teachers? Just stand and watch and smile at the students who cheat in the exam, smoke, fight, or use abusive or obscene language in front of the teachers? Just love and forgive all and everything?

      My answer to these real as well as imaginary questions is a firm and emphatic No. No, you should not. You must try and do your best to stop them from doing all those misdemeanors by employing any means and methods available, useful, usable, and effective, but the physical force. You had better give up the teaching profession already and look for another job, if you have no other means than the easiest as well as the oldest way of correcting or stopping them. There should and must be infinite number of ways, techniques and methods for the truly good and qualified teachers to resort to other than the impulsive reaction of raising your hands or fists.

      There is nothing like "the educational flogging," or "the whip of love," as the advocates for the physical punishment maintain. Such a familiar phrase or a term of endearment is a baloney of nonsense coined and used by the teachers to justify their act of barbarity and to camouflage the sadistic pleasure they enjoy from it. Whatever name it has, it is a sheer brutality, savagery, cruelty, and ultimately torture. Man becomes a beast the moment he means to inflict physical pain on other living creatures. A kind mother full of affection to her baby or a good and respected teacher by the students is no exception.  

      Corporal punishment for education is itself a contradiction in terms. Education is the very effort to tame, subdue and finally get rid of the beast sleeping in man. We educate man to make him realize the intrinsic as well as the inherent dehumanizing quality in the use of physical force, and instead to awaken him to the virtue of words. The first educated man in the history of human civilization was he who used all the worst and most abusive language in the world to vent his anger towards his rival, instead of cracking his skull with his ax. The existence of corporal punishment at school is a great anachronism here and now, when it is already strictly forbidden and abolished by law and regulation in the military barracks, and in the police.
                    (January 16, 1999)