Corporal Punishment

The suicide of a student from La Martiniere School, Kolkata has come to the headlines today. Allegedly, the student committed suicide because he was caned by the Principal of the school. Without supporting corporal punishment - being a teacher myself I have never raised my hand on my students - I would like to say that such issues were not a 'big deal' when we were kids. When I was in school in the 1980s to us the figure of the Principal was incomplete without the cane. In fact, the Principal would have several canes in his office to choose from for a particular punishment. To make the caning sting more he would stick rubber bands to them. Sometimes when he was in a good mood he would allow the concerned student to choose the weapon.

Teachers in the classrooms did not have the luxury of using canes, but they had variety at their disposal. They would usually use a wooden footruler to kiss the bums of the boys. Some of them would instruct the boys to stretch over the teacher's desk to offer a good view of the bum. For girls the punishment would be restricted to getting their palms slapped with the footruler.

But there would be variety. Being made to stand in front of the class, stand up on the bench, stand holding one's ears, stand outside the class, kneel in front of the class, kneel down outside the class .... kneeling down in front of the class was a personal favourite with me, for I would then be able to reach out to the chalk dust beneath the blackboard, and write all sorts of naughty things on the blackboard to make my classmates laugh - or simply make faces from behind the teacher.

Some teachers would go up a degree and ask the student to become a 'murga', that is to sit on one's haunches, and hold the ears by passing the hands through the legs! The head master believed in knocking hard on the heads, attempting to strike some sense in them. Another teacher would pull hard at both sideburns before knocking on the head. The student would lift himself up on his toes with the vain hope of being able to avert pain! This particular teacher had another secret up his sleeve - one tight slap ... and the student could be identified for the next one week by the marks on his face as the fellow who was punished by "Mr. ...."

But we all preferred this form of punishment, what we dreaded was a diary entry informing our parents of our misdeeds. And the greatest humiliation of all was the summoning of the parents!

Gone are the glorious days of corporal punishment!

No punishment is worth anything if the student is not intersted in learning and reforming. On such students no good punishment should be wasted.