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Spare the rod, love the child

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TS Sudhir
TS SudhirJul 23, 2015 | 21:29

Spare the rod, love the child

There is a reason why I was reminded of my Class 5 Maths teacher Mrs Mahajan today. I can still vividly remember how one afternoon, she terrorised our classmate Gurpreet Singh because he had not done his Geometry homework. In front of the entire class, she threatened to strip him of his trousers. The young Sikh bawled, howled, screamed, practically brought the house down, holding his belt so tight, as if it was his dear life. All to prevent Mahajan m'am from making a below-the-belt move. She wouldn't give up either, it was her brand of corporal punishment at its worst, most perverse and frightening. To make an example of Gurpreet that not doing one's homework could shame us in front of 50 students. Boys and girls. She almost succeeded that day.

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I have always associated my fear of Maths to this one incident. To me and many of my classmates, Mahajan m'am was a monster, a terror who killed the joy of learning maths. Forever.

Today a young girl, K Ashrita from Huzurabad in Karimnagar district of Telangana, died in Warangal's MGM hospital, after having been subjected to corporal punishment for not having done her Maths homework. The nine-year-old girl was a student of Class 5. Last Thursday, her teacher, Kala had punished Ashrita and five other students at the Vivek Vardhini Model school by making them stand in the position of a chair. This means resting your back against the wall and bending your knees, as if you are sitting on an imaginary chair. Try it and feel how your knees start paining in seconds. The six students stayed like that for over half an hour.

By the time Kala took pity, Ashrita had suffered a blood clot in her knees. She was hospitalised when it led to fever, vomitting and other complications the next day. Her daily wage worker parents took her first to a private hospital in Huzurabad, then shifted her to Hasini hospital in Hanamkonda and finally MGM hospital at Warangal. Neither medicines nor prayers worked. The Maths teacher's harsh punishment had taken its toll on Ashrita's body and spirit. She could not fight back. The arithmetic of her life stopped at the digit "9".

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Her grieving parents and relatives were livid at what they saw as a cold-blooded murder. They vandalised the school, demanding that action be taken against the teacher and the principal. Other youth outfits asked for the recognition of the school, that teaches till Class 10, be cancelled. The parents filed a case with the police under section 304(2) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which is for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Till evening, they had kept their young one's body at the school, refusing to cremate it till they got justice from the school management.

This is not the first case of corporal punishment that has come to light. The problem is that school teachers, armed with a B.ed degree, know little about how to handle kids, deviant or otherwise, with sensitivity. Insult, humiliation, beating are all different ways to lower the self-esteem of a child. The moment a teacher looks at the classroom as a battleground where the students are an adversary to be tamed and bullied, it is the beginning of psychological corporal punishment. It only manifests itself overtly when the teacher reduces himself or herself to behaving like what Mahajan m'am did with Gurpreet and Kala did with Ashrita.

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The tragedy is that in her quest to show Ashrita her place she removed her roll number from a place in her mother Rama's loving arms. A lifetime of hope, love, affection that Rama and Sammaiah had for their daughter, reduced to ashes.

But while it is fair to pillory the teacher for what she did, the bigger villain is the education system. A system that by granting degrees to men and women, confers on them the exalted status of a teacher and the license to handle the future of India in whatever manner they deem fit. But one incident and the same system brands the teacher as a black sheep, as if it had no role in bringing him or her into the classroom.

Then there is also the issue of what is taught. Teachers do not impart education, they only finish the syllabus. The quest is for ticking the portions completed, not the learning. The teacher is under pressure. If unbuttoning Gurpreet's trousers would make all homework shirkers fall in line or risk being shamed, so be it. If Ashrita and her classmates suffered unbearable pain in their fragile knees, so be it.

Rama and Sammaiah are grieving tonight. There was an outpouring of response on my Twitter timeline to my tweets on this story from Huzurabad town, proof that everyone identifies with a situation like this. Because any one of us could be a Rama and a Sammaiah.

A young child has the right to dignity. He or she cannot and must not be made to feel small, at home or in the classroom. The loss of a precious angel is just too heavy a price to pay for foolish attempts to discipline.

Last updated: February 26, 2016 | 12:52
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