May 14th, 2007
Corporal Punishment
Before I get to the matter which is the subject of this post, I'd just like to say that, despite the text below sounding a bit angry, I'm actually doing really, really well here at school. I love this place, and I've come to really enjoy the company of both my students and my fellow teachers. I'd say that the biggest difference between my experience here and my experience in China is that in China, the whole reason I enjoyed myself while at school centered around having other foreigners to hang out with. Here in Tanzania, I actually prefer hanging out with Tanzanians as opposed to visiting with PCVs. It's not that I don't like the PCVs here - they're a great group of people. It's more that I enjoy the company of students and teachers just as much, and at the end of the day I have a limited amount of time to spend with Tanzanians, whereas I have the rest of my life to spend with Americans.
So the difference in "integration" (as PC likes to call it) is completely different, which isn't all that surprising I guess, considering knowing Swahili goes a long way towards achieving that goal. To be honest, I couldn't imagine coming here and volunteering for an extended period of time without being proficient in Swahili. Yeah, I could function as a teacher only using English, and to be honest most of the teachers at my school have excellent English as well. But at the same time, knowing Swahili opens up so much more in the way of social interaction that you just can't get otherwise, and I will be forever grateful to our awesome language teachers for that.
So yeah, everything's still going amazingly well. The Form 4 students finished today, because tomorrow they start their mock national examinations, so my teaching load will go down a bit. Then it's off to Iringa for a week in the beginning of June for our IST (in-service training), back to school for a couple weeks of relaxing, and then my mom and cousin come to visit! Should be a really awesome vacation, and I hope they'll come to enjoy this country as much as I do.
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Now, for the subject. I'll say it, because this is a subject I refuse to mince words over or sugar-coat in any way: corporal punishment sucks. I'm sorry, but I can't really understand how people think physically assaulting children is a good idea for their emotional or intellectual development.
Maybe I should give a little background first. Corporal punishment is technically legal here in Tanzania - there are laws regarding its use in schools, which I can tell you are never followed. Generally, corporal punishment here involves hitting a student with a stick, either on the hand or on the rear. A student is not supposed to be hit more than 3 times for any one infraction, and a log book is supposed to be kept detailing each incident, saying why the punishment was given and the number of strokes.
But as I said, those rules are never followed. I've seen students here be hit 6-8 times, which is well over the maximum they are supposed to receive. Then again, I think my school is actually not so bad in terms of corporal punishment - I have heard stories of students being sent to the hospital because they were beaten so severely by their teachers. At least here they just use sticks, but students at other schools have been hit on the head (yeah, great idea), and with objects much worse than sticks (such as rocks).
So overall I haven't had extreme issues with corporal punishment here - I know it could be much worse. But that doesn't change the fact that ANY amount of physical harm inflicted on students is an absolutely horrible idea. I can tell you, without a doubt, that students here are afraid of most of their teachers. Not only because they have told me that, but I can see it in their physical reactions. I have, on many occasions, accidentally moved my hand somehow towards a student, of course with no intention of hitting them. But they still flinch away, as if they're expecting to be hit (even though I have told them in no uncertain terms that I will never hit them). It's like Pavlov's dog - these kids are simply scared of their teachers. And that's a bad, bad situation.
I may not have a degree in education, but I can't for the life of me see how you can create a positive learning environment when students are afraid to speak in class, for fear that they will get hit. And there have been studies done which have shown that students who get hit come to resent the teachers that hit them. When you hate a teacher, and are also afraid of them, can you really learn as much from them if that was not the case?
Not to mention the fact that corporal punishment, on the whole, is not a very effective punishment either (which makes its use all the more baffling). For instance, I've had some issues with students cheating on exams, which is a very widespread problem here in Tanzania. Now, I could hit students for cheating, or I can give them zeros on the exam (which I have done). Which is more effective? I know if I were a student, I'd put up with getting hit a few times if it meant I could continue cheating at will.
I think the main reason teachers use it is because it's quick (i.e. they're lazy). Why spend an hour of your day supervising physical labor as a punishment when you can just whack the students a few times and be done with it? It's quick and easy - never mind the psychological effects it has on students.
Also, apparently some teachers feel like students won't respect them if they don't always walk around with a stick in their hand. Personally, I know I would NEVER respect a teacher precisely because they walked around with a stick in their hand. If you treat people with respect, generally that will be returned in kind. Hitting me with a stick like I'm an animal isn't treating me with respect.
Which brings me to another point - a couple of times I have been asked by students why Europeans came to Africa and pillaged all its resources and made slaves of the people. There's such a prevalent attitude here that all of Africa's problems lie at the feet of the white man. And don't get me wrong, the West has a lot of blood on its hands. But at the same time, look at Africa since most countries gained independence. You've got genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique, Idi Amin in Uganda (and northern Uganda today is still basically a war zone), the mess in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in Sudan, oh and a war in the DR Congo which has killed over 4 million people. This is Africa run by Africans, not by Western overlords. Sure, some of the seeds of those conflicts were sown by colonialists, but that doesn't justify the independent actions of others.
Now, that may seem like a wildly off-topic tangent, but I'll tie it in like this: Africans want to know why the White Man treated them so poorly. And yet I tell my students, look at how you treat each other! Is it really any better that your fellow Tanzanian is beating you with a stick instead of a European? Or that you are verbally berated by teachers and called stupid on a daily basis? Is this real progress from colonialism? Don't complain to me that Westerners treated Africans like lesser beings, when you do the same to each other all the time. If you talk the talk, then walk the damn walk.
And what makes me really sad is that probably most of these students of mine who profess to hate corporal punishment will probably grow up and hit their own children (or students, if they become teachers). This is such a conservative society, and the idea that corporal punishment "works" is so ingrained that nobody's willing to get away from it. There are exceptions, to be sure, but those are few and far between.
It's that mentality of "well, it was done to me, so I might as well do it to someone else to somehow cathartically place all of that pain and anguish onto someone else". There's a disconnect between the knowledge that people don't like to be hit, and the fact that that means they shouldn't hit others. There was actually a debate last Friday on whether or not corporal punishment should be banned in schools. I was shocked to actually find out that such a topic was going to be debated in a school, considering how much most teachers tend to believe in its usefulness. Unfortunately, out of all the debates we've had so far, this was the only one conducted entirely in Swahili (figures, it's the only one I really wanted to listen to). And while I didn't understand everything, it was easy to read students' reactions to both sides of the debate - they were obviously in favor of it being banned. It was also obvious that this is a subject they feel somewhat passionately about, as there was real audience interaction (unlike other debates, where students sit daydreaming or throwing grass at each other).
So like many other things, corporal punishment is an issue, but one that few people will actually do something about. It's like buses here - roads aren't all that safe, because bus drivers are idiots (besides not knowing how to drive well, there's a high incidence of driving under the influence). People will see news stories about bus crashes and click their tongues, saying what a shame it is, but those same people will happily get on a bus and not say a word when they know a driver has been drinking. That's just the way things are here, and why development takes a long time.
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So those are my thoughts, and obviously it's something I feel more than a little strongly about. I have no grand illusions about being able to single-handedly stop corporal punishment, but I do hope that I can instill in my students the sense that it is wrong. If even some of them grow up to not use the stick, then I will be happy.
It's also a hard issue because it's not easy to demonize teachers that use it. Aside from corporal punishment, many of the teachers at my school seem to genuinely care about teaching, and about helping the students. Which makes it all the more puzzling to understand why they use the stick, but it also makes it impossible to look at them as evil human beings. All of the teachers I regularly hang out with use corporal punishment, and yet (that issue aside) I think they're all good people, and good teachers. So it's a very hard issue to square away in my mind, because while I think corporal punishment is absolutely 100% wrong, I simply can't look at people I consider my friends in an evil light. It's probably the most difficult issue that many PCVs have to deal with - I think I have come to terms with it, but if you don't, it could very easily lead to you being miserable here.
Thankfully, as I said at the start, that's not the case. I am fully enjoying my time here, and I have really come to enjoy Tanzanians as a people. There are occasional annoyances (such as the word mzungu, which I will write about one day), but they are generally such warm, friendly, and tolerant people that I am glad to have come to know some of them.