Stopping corporal punishment

Md Nurnobi Islam Corporal punishment has been the most talked about issue in recent time. Possibly each of us must have some experience of it in our student life. We had to tolerate it for poor performance in class, failure to do homework, or for any other fault or offence. Minor punishment by the teachers with a view to disciplining students may be acceptable up to a certain level. But teachers at times are too cruel and mercilessly beat the students for no reason, or the reason best known to them. The student can not know why he got the punishment. During my school days seven years ago, I was a victim of corporal punishment. I was then a student of class seven at the age of 12. It was simply my inability to solve a math problem in a surprise test. The teacher started beating me and other students with a bamboo stick until it broke. This nightmarish event forced me to stay at home for ten days. Alamin, one of my friends shared his experience of being punished in his school life. He had just been admitted into class nine in a new school in Pabna. He was yet to be acquainted with the rules and regulations there. One day, he wrote his name on the black board. A teacher beat him up with double bamboo sticks until he ran away to escape this cruelty. The logic of that boastful teacher was that a student is not entitled to write on the black board without the permission of the teacher. Another friend of mine Lupom, while narrating his horrifying experience was shivering in anger even couples of years after he was mercilessly beaten by a teacher. He told how he became the victim of a teacher for not being his student in private tuition batch. "On the last day of my final practical exam, the teacher came to me and slapped me as severely as he could, claiming that my answer to a mathematical problem was incorrect". The teacher finally apologised to him because Lupom was correct in his solution. This is one of the most dominant causes of corporal punishment in our country. If the students do not come to tuition to a course teacher, he is unequally treated by teachers both in class and in exam papers. Though physical punishment is prohibited in educational institutions, many teachers hardly care about it. The responsibility of a teacher should not be confined only to teaching and punishing students. There should be a change in our education system and mental state of the teachers. Teachers who are friendly with students can command respect. This also yields a better result in the dissemination of education and knowledge. Government and the civil society must play their due role to come out of this curse. Recruitment of qualified teacher should receive high priority to stop corporate punishment. Training programme for the teachers should be arranged at a specified interval each year both to reinforce the efforts to raise awareness against corporal punishment and to improve their skills. Private coaching and tuition by the teachers should be banned through enactment of laws. The most important thing is to change the traditional views of teaching where teachers are considered as fearful objects and students are compelled to believe that a safe distance should be maintained between teachers and them. The writer is a student of Department of Marketing, Dhaka University and can be reached at email: Nurmkt157@gmail.com