Ngitawukushaya!

One of the biggest things that I struggle with in my schools – and I’m far from being alone in this – is corporal punishment. Not so much the struggle to get teachers to stop doing it (though obviously I do) but the struggle within myself to process my own feelings and knee-jerk reactions to it.

In theory I’m not completely against the occasional slap on the wrist or other physical correction of a child. Sometimes you just want to give a kid an immediate physical reminder that what they did probably shouldn’t be repeated. Of course there are other and better ways to get your point across, and I don’t think that myself I could ever hit a child in any way but I’m just saying…probably there will be no lasting psychological scars from the calm occasional or once in a great while spanking. (Can you see already how many qualifiers I’ve worked in? How uncomfortable this makes me?)

That said, the first time I witnessed a teacher hitting students in her class it was probably one of the more horrible things I’ve ever had to sit and watch. Those children were terrified of every movement she made, and I personally was on the point of tears. First grade for goodness sake! How can you expect kids to learn to love reading if their first experience with it is like something out of Full Metal Jacket? But that’s not really the point (for now). I’ve seen other teachers hit, slap, humiliate, and pinch their learners. Other volunteers tell me horror stories involving full on whips. My schools, to be fair, are actually pretty good about corporal punishment. I’ve only seen three outright text-book examples (of course, I’m sure there were all sorts of other instances that I didn’t), but I felt like I was the one being hit each time.

Many of my teachers, while they won’t admit to hitting their learners, per se, still see nothing wrong with it as a teaching method, and herein lies the root of my problem:

In my eyes if you are capable of hitting a child openly and without remorse you are, with no shades of black and white, a Bad Person. In the eyes of my teachers and the people in my village, you are probably just a Caring Guardian. I have trouble talking to any teacher after I have seen them do this. I don’t want to be in their classroom, I don’t even want to look them in the eye or greet them in the morning. They have shifted catergories, moved into the unforgivable.

Is a good part of this a cultural thing? Yes, probably. I know perfectly well that corporal punishment was and is practiced in pretty much every school system that ever has existed. I know it is a very recent innovation that means that I (or more to the point, Robbie) never got called into an office and whapped good for whatever stupid thing I had done. I know all about nuns and rulers, and Mr. Spoon, and Roald Dahl’s stories, and all the rest of it. It happens, it happened, western civilization doesn’t seem to have come crashing down for it. But still. I was never hit as a child (maybe once, I have a vague recollection…), teachers in my classes never threatened to hit me, the very thought of violence as a disciplinary measure is something that I managed to grow up blissfully unaware of. And so when I see it, I am shocked. I consider it immoral, bad, I am incapable of seeing shades of grey. I cannot translate this as ‘culture’ even though every rational, far off part of me is saying that these are exactly the sort of clashes I was warned and taught about over and over.

Am I right? Are they wrong? I don’t know. I just can’t condone the violence as a solution, in any context, but I am willing to work towards understanding why my teachers can. Understand that I mean the rational, under control, occasional slap or pinch or whatever. I have also seen teachers simply lashing out at students at anger and in frustration, and I think that that is just wrong – no culture, no mitigations. Children should never be the vent for your aggravation. I don’t care how much the teacher hates their job or how poorly trained and frustrated they are. Unacceptable.

So what am I going to do about all this? I really don’t know. I’ll put on my workshops, I’ll explain the alternatives to every teacher I catch. I’ll tell them how against it I am and that I will walk out of any classroom where I see learners being hit. I’ll refuse to work with that teacher again until we work out a solution, a suitable set of disciplinary alternatives. It is, all my cultural qualms aside, against the law anyway.

But what does this mean for my cross cultural education? Do I just accept this as an example of “our cultures are different, hooray diversity!” Is it something I can change? Is it something I should bother changing? Is it inherently wrong or is it just my perspective?

Its that last one that gets me. Does cultural diversity translate to moral relativism? Do I get to be the one to draw the line in the sand?