BENGALURU: Disturbing incidents of teachers resorting to violence to ‘punish’ the student for homework not done, spelling errors, nonconformity with discipline etc have been occurring across the country.
In Gadag, a teacher, Muthappa Yellapa Hadagali (33), hit 10-year-old student Bharat Barker with a spade and threw him off the first floor of the school building, killing him. This and similar such incidents reported from other states cannot be defined as corporal punishment because in all these cases, children bore the brunt of alleged misplaced anger and interpersonal issues of the teacher, who used the child as a tool of his vengeance.
Incidents of corporal punishment are indicative of either deep-rooted mental health issues of these teachers, which may have been aggravated by the pandemic, lack of aptitude to handle children, changing attitude of the students towards their teachers and access to information on the internet.
Covid-19 posed the biggest challenge to health and education. There is no doubt that there is as much a paradigm shift in our education system as is there in the student-teacher relationship. The pandemic-induced lockdown resulted in changing of gears -- from physical teaching to virtual -- for which neither the teachers, school managements nor the students and their parents were ready.
Children in primary schools were impacted the most because of the learning gap and the time teachers lost in helping them develop their concepts. A first-standard student did not attend offline classes for two years and was promoted to fourth grade, resulting in a huge gap in concept development.
Children missed out on the stimulus of not only physical classes but also of social and life skills that they learn in school. The teachers, on the other hand, were offboarded from offline to online during the ‘education emergency’ and were propelled back to offline teaching when the curbs were lifted. With mounting pressure from the school management and parents to deliver 100 per cent results, most of the teachers, who too have suffered their own share of anxieties, health, family, financial losses and social issues during the pandemic, are finding it difficult to cope.
To understand the tension in an otherwise sacred relationship between the teacher and the taught, one must look at how teachers are recruited for primary schools in government and private setups, the training they undergo to equip them to teach fragile young minds and their aptitude to handle children.
“Unfortunately, there are teachers who are not emotionally qualified to teach children. A teacher needs a lot of empathy, patience and affection to teach a child. There is no aptitude test to get into the training profession. The focus is on curriculum. Unfortunately, a ‘good’ teacher is perceived as someone who completes the curriculum in time and achieves 100 per cent results. It is not only the management’s expectation, it is also what parents look for when choosing a school for their ward,” said a mental health expert.
Teaching, which has been traditionally viewed as an ‘easy’ career option, is on the contrary a tough challenge, which tests a teacher’s academic, mental, emotional, social, personal and interpersonal skills every day before young learners. Academic brilliance does not alone qualify someone to become a teacher. Understanding child psychology is a must. Present-generation learners have the internet to ‘learn’ from. Their expectations of the teacher are much higher than the earlier generations.
The ‘I-know-it-all’ attitude has further impacted the student-teacher relationship. “Students can correct a teacher for wrong pronunciation and challenge them on their teaching skills. It can be humiliating for a teacher. One has to be emotionally mature and thorough in one’s subject to handle the new generation learners,” said a teacher, who didn’t wish to be named.
“All it takes is for the teacher to sit down with a ‘non performer.’ Most of them are loners or angry because there is no one to listen to them or they may have a learning disability. Under pressure to deliver 100 per cent results, the teacher has very little time,” she added.
Corporal punishment is illegal, but it is no secret that corporal punishment is frequently practised as a means of “disciplining” children. “We do not condone it in any school, but it is inevitable that some teachers resort to corporal punishment, and are often only found out when reported,” said Karnataka Associated Management of Schools General Secretary, D Shashi Kumar. He also mentioned that often, teachers are afraid of using any kind of disciplinary action out of fear.
“Children are aware that they can’t be hit and often use it to blackmail. A teacher pulled up before the student and parents by the school management can lose out on her standing in class,” added another teacher.
Educationist Dr Ananth Prabhu G from Dakshina Kannada observed, “Corporal punishment is used for various reasons – from disciplining to enforcing rules and guidelines, or to making a point about the consequences of a student’s misbehaviour. The purported long-term goal is to change the child’s behaviour and to make it more consistent with the adult expectations.” But the impact of corporal punishment can be devastating and often, long-lasting on a child.
“It takes a long time for a child to overcome his/her fear of corporal punishment. The mental scarring is deeper than the physical. Children not only experience pain, sadness, fear, anger, shame and guilt, they also feel threatened. Children who have been physically punished tend to exhibit high hormonal reactivity to stress,” added Prabhu.
To overcome the trauma of corporal punishment, children “should be encouraged to talk to a trusting adult, such as a teacher, school counsellor or family member about how they are being treated. Parents and teachers can encourage children to find positive outlets to express their feelings, such as art, music or sports. One can even seek professional help to deal with trauma related to corporal punishment. Education and life skill interventions to build a positive and violence-free environment at school and strengthening of relationships among students, teachers and administrators are a must,” he added.
Speaking on behalf of teachers in government schools, Chidanand, a teacher in a government school in Shahabad taluk, Kalaburagi, said teachers are “overburdened” and the government extracts maximum work from them. “They have less time for teaching and completing the syllabus because of which, sometimes they lose their cool. They should not be tasked with anything else other than teaching,” he added.
Scars that refuse to heal
(With inputs from Donna Eva, G Subhash Chandra, Mallikarjun Hiremath, Ramkrishna Badseshi and Divya Cutinho)