CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

My teachers teach ABC: assault, beating, castigating!

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen. But what if the teachers are felonious?  Clearing the fuzziness, we all have had prodigious teachers who have taken efforts to silhouette our life in optimistic way in some point of our life. However, there’s an institutionalized problem is a tradition student-teacher relationship in Indian schools. The teacher’s job is to discipline and punish the students. This indubitably crafts a rigid milieu in class.

The more extreme forms of this classroom authoritarianism are corporal castigation and sexual abuse. Two months ago, 45 years old computer professor sexually assaulted a girl in third grade. In June, a teacher in Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu shadowed a girl student to the toilet to assault her.  We see such stories as aberrations which appear routinely in our newspapers. As a matter of fact, these are just reported cases that we come across in the news channels and papers. If we had to check the actual regularity with which these appear you will see an entrenched culture of sexual abuse. This is a fear for rustic parents to send their daughters to school. These sexual assaults are nothing short then rape.

Children go to school every morning being apprehensive about the oiled cane. How happy those children are on Teacher’s Day who has been the victim of corporal punishment tearing the ear drum? Not all teachers go attacking children for incomplete homework. On 2^nd October 2015 a Varansi boy was burnt by blistering iron road for not completing his homework. The teacher burned my hands & feet with an iron because I didn't do my English home work: Krishna, student (source twitter). A 13-year-old girl who was allegedly punished by her school teacher to strike a taxing stress posture with a brick on her back in the sun died after five days of high fever, likely fallout of the corporal punishment she underwent.

Are the teachers possibly teaching our nation’s young minds that they live in a violent society? If we consider teachers as most important in our national, we can blame them equally for the traumatized state of young children. Ideal teachers teach the students to make a world a better place and live without fear. Conversely, teachers have made their schools a nightmare for the innocent.

SAYALI PARAB