HERRAMIENTAS PARA RECABAR INFORMACIÓN SOBRE LOS APRENDIZAJES

5.5.1 Junior secondary schools

It has been well recorded that corporal punishment may have a variety of adverse neurological, physical, behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social development outcomes. All the participants from the two junior secondary schools gave an account of how corporal punishment had affected their lives at school. It was noteworthy that even those respondents who had earlier stated that corporal punishment was not used in their schools shared their experiences when this question was asked. The responses were fairly repetitive and therefore selected responses are recorded below:

P1: “I felt really sad after I was punished because my classmates laughed at me.”

UNICEF (2007:8) maintains that “corporal punishment causes psychological damages that obviously reflect on a child's self-esteem and self-confidence, and having other negative long-term personality effects.” A study by Griffin, Robinson and Carpenter (2000:5) found that “the negative side effects of punishment include running away; [playing] truant; fearing teachers or school; feeling high levels of anxiety, helplessness, and humiliation; and being aggressive or destructive at home and school”. It is obvious that the learner revealed shame and humiliation in the above response, which are destructive emotions that did not necessarily result in corrective behaviour.

P2: “Concentrating in class becomes really hard after I’ve been hit as I get angry at the teacher.”

P3: “I lose focus because I cry after I’ve been hit. They hit us very severely.”

P4: “I start shaking. I become very restless and uncomfortable. I can’t even hear what the teacher is saying and just pray that she quickly leaves the class.”

P5: “The pain and anger that develop after I’ve been hit prevent me from focusing during the lesson.”

P6: “The beating we receive on our backs is really painful; it stings. I become sweaty and my focus shifts from the teacher to rubbing the pain on my back.”

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Shukla and Singh (2013: 59) argue that poor attention span, increased dropout rate, school avoidance and school phobia, low self-esteem, anxiety, somatic complaints, depression, suicide, and retaliation against the teacher” are consequences of corporal punishment. The above comments thus clearly reveal that the use of corporal punishment affects children much deeper than the temporary pain that it inflicts. Severe psychological and emotional complications have been found to arise in children who have been the target of corporal punishment and these affects can influence one’s life well into adulthood. Gershoff (2002) argues that “a positive association has been found between the use of corporal punishment (CP) and psychological distress, specifically depressive symptoms. Students who witness or are victims of CP in school are at risk of developing a range of psychosocial problems, including depression, suicidal ideation and anxiety”.

What was most disturbing about the effects of corporal punishment as revealed in the above responses is the fact that virtually none of these learners could concentrate in class subsequent to the punishment. This suggests that the impact of the punishment was extended to the point where learners’ ability to learn was negated, which is ironic as this outcome directly opposes the purpose of corporal punishment which is to encourage the learner to behave and pay attention so that learning can occur.

The emotional outcome of corporal punishment can be quite severe in some instances, as one learner testified:

P7: “I cry. The pain becomes unbearable and I feel like attacking the teacher.”

The Department of Education (2007:7) argues that corporal punishment stands in the way of proper communication between the educator and the learner and therefore hides the real problems behind misconduct which need to be tackled, such as trauma, poverty-related problems and conflict at home. The use of corporal punishment has been shown to contribute to truancy and high drop-out rates in South African schools.

The above learner’s aggressive response (“I feel like attacking the teacher”) should also be heeded as a red flag that issues a dire warning of aggression that builds up in some learners. Such aggression can become unmanageable and may erupt in incidences of attacks and violence such as those that were recently reported in the media in the US and in video clips on cellular phones that have gone viral in South Africa Iannuzzi (2017).

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Other participants commented as follows:

P8: “I feel very sad for the entire period because being beaten by the educator is very hurtful.”

P9:“I always get the idea that my educator hates me because she always targets me and beats me more than the other learners. Sometimes she calls me names; she calls me ‘Isitabane’ (gay).”

According to Charles (2002:48), relationships between teachers and learners break down in situations that occur “when educators teach dictatorially, speak sarcastically, speak mockingly, order learners around, point out learners' shortfalls and act as though misbehaviour is completely the learners' fault”. Learners who find themselves in such predicaments lose motivation, vacillate to cooperate, and sometimes answer back impolitely.

Another learner stated:

P10: “When they hit us on the buttocks it becomes hard to sit at the desk. We have no choice but to sit, no matter how painful our buttocks are. If don’t sit because of the pain, we will receive yet another beating for standing in class.”

5.5.2 Senior secondary schools

Similar patterns as those that were revealed above were noted among learners in the senior secondary schools. Every learner, including those who had stated earlier on that corporal punishment was not used in their schools, also shared their experiences of how the infliction of corporal punishment impacted their learning. The subsequent comments illustrate some of the effects of corporal punishment on learners in this phase of schooling:

P1: “After receiving the punishment from my educator I was sad and in pain.”

P2: “I cried and the entire class laughed at me. They called me a ‘sissy’ and said that boys don’t cry.”

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P3: “The pain on the buttocks becomes so severe that it becomes hard to pay attention in class.”

P4: “I find it difficult to focus in class as I feel anger and resentment towards the teacher that beat me.”

P5: “They beat us severely. You can’t even sit or hold a pen because of the pain. Sometimes you get beaten even though you did nothing wrong. That on its own creates anger and resentment towards the educator and the subject that he/she teaches.”

Earlier studies on corporal punishment have revealed that numerous negative effects are caused by the use of this form of punishment among students, such as: “…neurotic reactions like fear, anxiety, withdrawal, tension, timidity, trauma, stress, submissiveness, resentment, poor performance, drop out, injury and, in extreme cases, death” (Mugambi, 2008:30-31). Additionally, the use of corporal punishment was found to cause mental torture and other effects include making children more aggressive, defiant, hostile and violent which eventually may lead to the destruction of property.

The “anger and resentment” that P5 felt are thus indicative of the breakdown in communication between the teacher and the learner, and it may thus be surmised that, if this relationship is not healed, the learner will find it hard to work constructively in the subject and to achieve well. In fact, doing poorly in a particular subject may be used as a form of retaliation to ‘get back’ at the teacher and to reverse the ‘position of power’ of the teacher, although such an attitude may impact the learner more adversely in the end. The point that is made here is that some learners may have no recourse other than doing poorly in a subject if they have been deeply offended and humiliated by a teacher.

The previous point is illustrated by the following comment:

P6:“Sometimes I don’t even want to come to school. I’ve even thought of leaving school and go find work at the factories in [mentioning the name of the study area].”

The above comment is supported by Du Preez et al. (2002:88), who maintain that children who have been exposed to lashings, paddling or other harsh disciplinary practices have reported the

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following problems: “…frequent withdrawal from school activities, disengaging academically, tendency for school avoidance and high drop-out as children do not learn well when they are distracted by fear”. Soneson and Smith (2005:22) further maintain that corporal punishment works in contradiction of the process of ethical development by teaching children not to participate in certain behaviours as they fear they will be beaten. It does not teach them to contemplate the reasons and ethics for not behaving in a particular way and frequently covers the origin of the problem; so this means that it is not normative and self-regulation is absent so children depend on policing and inspection for their progress. It is against this background that there is a critical need to eradicate corporal punishment in South African schools.

The participants’ comments further illustrated the anger, resentment, and humiliation they felt when they had been punished physically:

P7: “Some teachers give it to us really hard so that sitting at the desk becomes impossible, let alone concentrating. If the teacher notices that you’re distracted, he will come back again and give you another beating on top of the one you’ve just received.”

P8: “I felt humiliated when I was beaten in front of all the grade 12 classes. They shouldn’t have done that. I became a laughing stock for the entire second term.”

P9: “It happened that I stopped coming to school after my friends and I had been beaten by four male educators. I was scared and embarrassed but I eventually went back and got beaten for absenteeism.”

P10: “I lose concentration during the lesson and can’t even hear what the teacher is saying because I’m busy rubbing where I was hit. I lose focus and end up nursing the pain”. The above comments are consistent with the findings by the Department of Education (2000:7), as it is postulated that corporal punishment takes children’s focus away from the wrongdoing and that they focus on the experience of being beaten instead.

However, the notion that, because corporal punishment is a form of abuse and therefore it has numerous adverse psychological effects such as depression, inhibition, rigidity, lowered self- esteem and heightened anxiety” is questioned by Benatar (2009:9). The latter author argues that even though there is enough evidence that disproportionate and extreme infliction of corporal

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punishment can drastically increase the probability of such psychological harm, “most of the psychological data is [sic] woefully inadequate to the task of demonstrating that mild and infrequent corporal punishment has such consequences”. This scholar contests Straus’s (2001) argument that even occasional and non-injurious corporal punishment can heighten the probability that a child can become depressed.

Another belief that is strongly held by Straus (2001) is that when the child does not obey, the parent then intensifies the harshness and brutality of the punishment, ultimately hurting the child. The activists against the use of corporal punishment support this view and note that actual discipline is not founded on force but develops from understanding, shared respect and leniency while corporal punishment does not communicate anything about how children are expected to behave. In fact, “hitting children is a lesson in bad behaviour as it teaches children that adults find it acceptable to use violence to sort out problems or conflicts” (ECP, 2010:3). This threatening approach is also refuted by Williamson-Maloy (2010:15), who notes that positive discipline comprises everything from establishing rules and expectations for your children to accentuating listening skills in parents’/teachers’/children. Thus, selecting penalties should offer teaching opportunities, and threatening your child into submission does not work.

5.6 Corporal Punishment Exacerbates Undesirable Behaviour