By Charles Okoth
In the recent past, I have seen some touching disciplinary procedures by teachers which have taken social media by storm.
In one case, a schoolboy was thoroughly caned for failing to score four hundred marks out of the possible five hundred marks.
According to the teachers, the boy was underperforming yet he had the potential to do better.
They must have attributed this to laziness or truancy and they felt the cane could do away with the bad act. From my experience, such things happen in schools and at times, the desired result has been achieved. Learners have ended up working very hard, if only to avoid the sting of the cane. Some have ended up doing very well academically, and even succeeding in life generally.
In the other case, a girl who had a problem of bedwetting was made to move around with a huge manila paper, covering her whole front. The manila had the writing: ‘It is my hobby to urinate on beds’.
The act by the teachers is shameful and unfortunate. In would rather be caned than walk around with a manila paper with such writings.
The girl could be a victim of the medical condition called Enuresis: the inability to control discharge of urine. It is in effect involuntary urination; one just passes urine without prompting. It is worse at night, when one is asleep (Nocturnal enuresis).
This implies that the idea of indicting the kid for the condition and making them announce it to the whole world is grossly callous and ill advised. Using that form as a punishment is extremely abusive and has the potential to cause permanent damage to the child.
It can make the child hate school, run away, hate teachers and even hate their parents for giving birth to them with such a condition.
In reality, teachers involved in such forms of disciplinary procedures were simply trying to help the children toe the line. Probably, the children in the above cases were being made to obey ‘School Rules and Regulations’. One regulation could be that a pupil had to score 400 marks and above or be caned. The other regulation could be that students in the school will not be expected to urinate in their beds and that those who do so will move around with huge manila papers announcing that bedwetting is their hobby.
Probably these teachers had the best intentions. Which parent doesn’t want their child to score high marks? There are cases where parents prevail upon teachers to use the cane lavishly. During my own time, it was a taboo to report to a parent that you had been caned in school. It attracted an even bigger punishment from the parent, the logic being that if a teacher caned a learner, it was purely to teach the learner knowledge. We were told the teacher used the cane to drive away stupidity.
Needless to say, we need better ways of approaching certain disciplinary issues in our schools. We cannot allow personal preferences to form part of our disciplinary modus operandi.
Every school should have a desirable set of school rules which help learners achieve their objectives in school. Anyone breaching these tenets is liable for punishment.
It must be emphasized that the tenets to be espoused by the school community must be agreeable to the general civilized public. They must not breach any statutory provisos. In effect, they must be lawful. A school exists in a society and cannot create rules that would breach the National Law or Constitution.
Schools are therefore urged to align their rules and regulations with the Constitution. Those running the schools should also ensure they are conversant with the various Acts that guide education in the country.
Anything done contrary to these statutory guidelines is illegal and can attract censure in its various forms, some of which can prove very traumatic for the officer contravening them. One can get interdicted, dismissed, and even jailed for an act like assault and causing actual bodily harm.
Caning was abolished and teachers are expected to be foremost in this knowledge. But mambo kwa ground iko different, if I may borrow a Sheng expression. I am not saying it is widely practised; I am simply saying that there are cases of this brutality here and there.
Physical injury may not be as bad as psychological injury. When a teacher psychologically abuses a child, the implication is terrible. From Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis, this damage will shape the child’s overall world outlook in the future. It will determine what sort of adult that child will grow into. That simply means teachers’ actions shape what sort of adult population a country will have.
A nation’s top notch leaders are manufactured in schools, so are its crooks, murderers, thieves, and others.
It is with knowledge in mind that I urge good reason and tact to guide us as we discipline our learners. Let’s adhere to the law. Let’s interrogate ourselves: are we helping the child or ruining him/her? Are we humiliating or correcting? As king David prayed to God, ‘Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger…’; so let us hold ourselves back and not let anger or malice have a hand in any disciplinary procedure.
Charles Okoth is an award-winning book author and a retired teacher based in Busia County
