Recently, the media reported an instance where a class VII student was ‘badly thrashed’ by the principal. Later, the boy needed to be hospitalised. The principal was charged under section 324 of the IPC. The place of corporal punishment, in modern-day schooling is increasingly being questioned. Will corporal punishment tame the shrews? I have my doubts, as I’ve been at the receiving end of this method, on numerous occasions as a student.
Once, I was caught laughing in class and was asked to stand outside the class by the teacher. I obeyed the hurt teacher’s command. Standing outside, I noticed with terror, more disciplinary action fast approaching me, as I caught the sight of the principal, a priest, on his daily rounds. Promptly, he enquired about the incident that earned me the punishment. Before I could complete my narration, the principal had gripped my ear between his thumb and the index finger and rotated it. After letting go of my ear, which had by then turned crimson, a steady slap on one of my cheeks caught me completely unawares and squirming in pain, more psychological than physical, of having been punished in front of my classmates.
On other occasions in high school, I have had to kneel in front of the whole class for ‘indiscipline’ of assorted kinds, till I identified another offender from among my not-so-disciplined classmates, who would take my place relieving my paining knees.
After school, I moved on to college to do the now defunct pre-degree course. While attempting to listen to a zoology teacher, this time a severely malnourished nun, a classmate passed around an extremely funny cartoon of the nun, which made me smile. Since the principal’s ‘dual-attack’, I had mastered the art of making sure smiles didn’t progress to laughter.
To the nun, my smile meant breached discipline. She asked me to move to the front bench ‘until further orders’. It was time to move on to medical college, where teachers had decided that ‘even God cannot save you’, as pronounced exasperatedly by the professor of Internal medicine, this time not for indiscipline, but for my allergy for voluminous medical textbooks.
Corporal punishment or not, students will be students in class. They are not that bad to be treated like difficult-to-train animals. After all, didn’t that naughty boy who was slapped by the principal for indiscipline move on to become a doctor, who was one among the team who treated his math teacher from the same school?
Email: earaly@hotmail.com