Teacher Cuts of Student's Hair; School Pillaged
Corporal punishment remains a key educational technique in India's massively overburdened school system. Every year millions of school children line up for their daily whack with a switch to their hands, or smack to the side of their heads for misbehaving in class, coming late, or getting a low score on a test. Most teachers don't even need a good excuse to hit their students into line.However this week in Kanpur a teacher may have gone a little too far when she took a pair of scissors and sliced off a child's hair. The Deccan Chronicle reports that Rinki Yadav, a child in class 3, showed up to class without having first put her hair into a braid. Furious at the ill-kept student the teacher called the principle, slapped the child several times and together they held her down and began to snip away her long locks.
Yadav then ran home in tears and told her parents before passing out from humiliation. After taking the child to the hospital to treat her panic attack the parents gathered a mob from around the town and ransacked the school. They broke windows, chairs and gutted the entire building.
"She always came to school shabbily dressed and her refusal to listen to us was affecting the discipline of the school. We even sent warning letters to her parents but the girl simply refused to tie her hair. On Thursday we cut her hair as punishment, but had no intention of humiliating the girl," said Principle Saloni Khanna in defense of her actions.
I am not sure which is worse, the actions of the teacher who would attack a student for such a small infraction (I would have been bald several times over if I had been in that class) or the parents who destroyed their children's only lifeline to an education when they destroyed the school.
(Etching: Sylvia Gosse, The Long Plait, 1915)
posted by Scott Carney @ 8:45 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Indian version of Columbine shootings; except no deaths. no guns. and oh, no law too. :-)
In some places the physical beating is worse, especially rural schools.
regards,
Shanks
Sadly in rural India this type of high attitude is very strong due to attitude problem and less rules and regulations.....but cities are no less in arm twisting....my daughter was refused to enter the school because she was wearing a gold bangle which me and my wife forgot to remove since we both were rushing off to work.As per school policy no jewellery is allowed which is fair enough and understandable.My driver made a franatic call stating the same and inspite of requesting the teacher to hand over the same to the driver did not weild any result.Finally I had to drive back all the way to the school to collect it in person ( again a rule) then she was allowed to enter.Ofcourse this issue is policy based but the problems one has to face is painful.The gold could have actually gone missing if she was studing in a rural school!I guess every school has some good points and some bad!?
Joydeep Saha
oh, corporal punishment crosses the line all the time, if at all there should be a line:
http://www.shivamvij.com/2006/09/the-school-of-violence.html
It is sad that Corporal punishment is still in vogue in India. Teachers Ed is the answer - Teachers must have a compulsory course on child psychology. I remember while I was growing up there, there used to be some teachers who would relish going at the knuckles with the narrow edges of wooden scales. One even did it with a dramatic flair taking the glasses off (if the student wore one) and then taking his watch off and rubbing the students cheeks a few times building up to a final frenzy of a slap on the cheeks. I realize no amount of training would impact those psychos but hopefully they are a small precentage.
How do you cut off a child's hair with "no intention of humiliating" them? I'm glad they fought back. Sounds like it was a lifeline to a lifeless education in being a lifelong subordinate.
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