Dear Editor,
I write with reference to Mr Brynmor Pollard’s letter in SN of September 23 urging government to abolish corporal punishment.
I taught in school in Guyana (1967-1972) and I currently work for NYC’s Department of Education as a high school teacher. Out of these experiences I have come to recognize that there is need for a certain level of discipline in the classroom. Absent this discipline and you end up with a classroom that is no longer conducive to teaching and learning – or barely so. And, this is the main reason why every year scores of schools in NYC are on the SURR list (School Under Registration Review) for low performance.
Corporal punishment as enforced with a cane in Guyana’s schools for the last hundred and fifty years has been abused. Should it be abolished simply because it has been widely abused? Could it be reformed and be made acceptable for the pro-abolishers’ tastes and sensibilities? I recognize that CP is a very sensitive subject (who wants to beat kids?); yet I also recognize that it a very necessary and effective disciplinary tool. And, if we abolish it and have nothing to replace it with, I am afraid all teaching and learning will grind to a halt. Our public school system will become little more than a warehousing system for boys and girls aged 6-18.
The value of retaining CP is not in its frequent use, but in its rare use, and in its deterrent value. Simply put, most students will conduct themselves appropriately in the classroom if only they know that something bad is going to happen to them if they start kicking down tables and chairs or pelting balls of paper when the teacher turns his back to write on the chalkboard.
What happens if you abolish CP and five years later the education standards collapse because the classrooms become un-teachable owing to ever larger numbers of wildly misbehaving students? The Ministry of Education will have to give account, and it will not be able to re-introduce any sort of effective disciplinary system.
Mr Pollard and the pro-abolishers’ group will argue that there are alternative measures of discipline. Well, trust me on this one, the alternative measures are not working and they are very expensive. Each year NYC’s Department of Education spends scores of millions of dollars for judges and substitute teachers to stand in for teachers who go to hearings for students brought up on misbehaving charges. And, the results are widely publicized – it does not work. Now could Guyana with a per capita income of less than US$3,000 afford such an alternative system that does not work?
CP is a poor country’s disciplinary tool. Let’s reform and retain it.
Wait a minute. Singapore is not a poor country and it makes wide use of caning in its prisons as well as in its schools. Here is an excerpt from the Web on Singapore’s caning policy:
“The Ministry of Education encourages schools to punish boys by caning for serious offences such as fighting, smoking, cheating, gangsterism, vandalism, defiance and truancy. Students may also be caned for repeated cases of more minor offences, such as being late repeatedly in a term. The punishment may be administered only by the Principal or Vice-Principal, or by a specially designated and trained Discipline Master. At most schools, caning comes after detention but before suspension in the hierarchy of penalties. Some schools use a demerit points system, whereby students receive a mandatory caning after accumulating a certain number of demerit points for a wide range of offences.“
My simple plea is for Guyana to have a vigorous debate on this issue before it throws out the baby with the bathwater. If Guyana needs a model, Singapore is that model.
Yours faithfully,
Mike Persaud
