Leave The Kids Alone

A student was beaten to death near Behror, another slapped into deafness in the capital, some girls were stripped in Hastsal and at least two others severely assaulted in Dehradun and Delhi. All in the last four months alone. Within their school premises and by their teachers.

Corporal punishment is alive and killing. Its latest victim is Ojasvi Khanna, a 14-year-old student of Oxford Senior Secondary School in Vikaspuri, Delhi. He has paid a very heavy price for forgetting to take his geometry box to class. "I was slapped so hard by the maths teacher that I felt excruciating pain in my left ear. I told her I couldn't hear anything. But nobody listened to me," recalls the traumatised boy. Although he has undergone complex surgery in his left ear, doctors say his hearing has been permanently impaired.

The school authorities are totally impervious to the boy's tragedy. While the principal, Kokila Prabhakar, persistently dodged contact, the school's official position is that Ojasvi was already suffering from an ear ailment and, therefore, they have no moral responsibility in the matter. "Nobody from his school has bothered to find out how Ojasvi is doing. It's as if an accident happened on the streets and not inside a school that is supposed to be accountable for a child's well-being," laments his distraught mother, Lilly Khanna.

Ojasvi's may be an extreme case, but many schools in the country insist on ruling by the rod with attendant consequences on children's psyche. Seven-year-old Saira Mayer of Delhi has nightmares about the physical violence she is often subjected to in school. Each morning sees her mother cajoling her to give school one more try.

Staggeringly large numbers have simply given up trying. According to the Human Resource Development Ministry's latest findings, the drop-out rate from primary schools is 75.36 per cent. "Our studies show that over 60 per cent of this is due to two factors—fear of examinations and corporal punishment," says a spokesperson for the Parents' Forum for Meaningful Education.

But as the Chandla Committee, set up by the Delhi government to re-evaluate Delhi's antiquated Education Act, discovered recently, as many as 41 per cent of parents interviewed favoured the retention of corporal punishment in schools. Niranjan Gupta, whose son studies in a leading pub-lic school in the capital, embodies this viewpoint: "I was caned when I was a kid and that did me good in the long run. How else does one learn to respect authority?"

Faith in this iron-handed approach, predictably, permeates the teaching community as well. According to Poonam Batra of the Maulana Azad Centre for Elementary and Social Education, inculcation of unquestioning obedience is the "hidden curriculum" in many a school. "Persistentnagging, verbal violence and blatant physical abuse are perpetuating a certain value system which conditions a child into being deferential towards the Establishment. A conformism not prescribed by our 'progressive' syllabi but unfortunately a part of our orthodox beliefs," she explains.

And this begins from the toddler stage. Some time ago, three-year-old Gagan Sachdev had to be taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to be treated for trauma after he returned from school with linear injuries on his legs. His father served a legal notice on the St Paul's Diocesan School in Jangpura in Delhi, when its principal thought a "written explanation" by the teacher concerned was sufficient. For months after that, little Gagan would mumble his hatred for teachers in his sleep.

Such physical humiliation can indeed have a permanent impact on a child's psyche. Says psychologist Bela Singh: "The loss of self-esteem before peers makes a child stubborn. In some cases, it makes a child aggressive as he begins to believe in violence as a corrective measure." The worst thing, she feels, is that corporal punishment generates "a fear of letters" and defeats the very purpose of education.

"Given the mammoth size of our classes, discipline often becomes an end in itself and education a secondary concern," says Geeta Nambisan of the Zakir Husain Centre for Education at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The educationist feels that teachers are rarely given practical training in child psychology. "So, they learn to cope however best they can—by screaming, scolding, punishing and beating." Those trying to generate greater awareness against the evils of corporal punishment are stonewalled by bureaucratic ignorance and indifference. In the labyrinth of files in the Education Department, there is hardly any reference to the havoc such physical punishment is wreaking on countless children.

But there are jail manual-like passages in the country's education acts which legitimise the practice and even prescribe finer details. Specifies Rule 37(4),(d) of the Delhi Education Act: "...such (corporal) punishment shall take the form of strokes, not exceeding 10, on the palm of the hand..."

But then, Ojasvi Khanna's maths teacher didn't care to count.