What would you do.......?

When I went for my VSO assessment day, I thought of the types of things I might be asked about potentially working in a developing country. Various things popped into my mind, but one issue I thought I might be asked about was corporal punishment: how I would deal with the prospect of seeing children being caned and what I would do about it.

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Corporal punishment is now illegal in Ghana, yet you go in to few schools in Ghana where you see no-one with a cane or stick in their hand. It is sometimes used as a pointer for the teacher – just because there’s a stick on the table does not mean that the teacher is beating the children. In fact, during my first 15 months in Ghana, I more often saw older children hitting wee ones than teachers beating children. Older children (sometimes monitors) stop younger ones from going into classes during tests and keep order in the playground. I also occasionally saw teachers beating children – normally hitting them around the ear with either stick or a hand – but it was not as often as I’d feared. I don’t know how accurate my view of this is though – teachers know that “sulemias” don’t approve of corporal punishment, so I get the impression that it happened less often when I was in school. However, overall I was pleasantly surprised by how little it was used – though admittedly, threatened often.

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However, a few weeks ago, I went to do a visit in one of my schools. This school is certainly the best of my 18. The children are all taught by qualified, trained teachers (which is very often not the case), the classes are relatively small (most around 40-50), the teachers are creative and effective in the way they teach (they even use group work (!)) and the head teacher is organised and efficient. I’d been asked to go in to observe the work of two new teachers who were sharing a class – one qualified teacher, who had just moved to primary from secondary and one national service volunteer.

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The NSV was taking the lesson and the other teacher was “watching” which in practise seemed to be sitting on the veranda, interrogating any child from other classes that went past to go to the toilet. At one point the man got up, spoke to two boys who I had noticed being a little lively, and got them to come to the front and kneel on the concrete in front of the class. I didn’t ask any questions, and was almost impressed that the teacher had chosen to do this rather than beat the boys. About 15 minutes later, two other children were sent to kneel down. At this point, I realised that the first two had been kneeling for a long time, and wondered if he would come back and tell them to sit. However, instead, the teacher came along and hit each child on the back of the legs five times with a long, thin cane. Perhaps after seeing this happen to child number one, I should have interrupted and asked him to stop. However, I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I chose not to, though certainly felt the anger rising inside me!

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When I had previously seen teachers using corporal punishment, I had not ever spoken to a teacher directly. However, as I was so horrified by what I witnessed (and also, admittedly, rather hungry which doesn’t help my anger levels!), I decided to speak to teacher directly. I asked him if he was a qualified teacher, and asked him if he knew it was illegal to hit children at school. He said that yes he was, but “ah, these children, they are hard to control”. I told him that I’d had smaller classes in the UK that were MUCH harder to deal with, that this was by far the worst case of beating that I’d seen, and that there were many effective behaviour management strategies he could use instead of hitting the children – and I’d be happy to show him some!

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I then left the class, saying I’d come back to observe him soon (which I still haven’t done…) and told a rather shocked head teacher what I had seen. She said she’d speak to him as well, and I think she will.

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Why didn’t I intervene? It’s difficult to say. Although if you are in a class with a Ghanaian head teacher or education office member, they will stop a lesson and correct a teacher, I am of the (British) impression that you shouldn’t undermine a teacher in front of a class – even if you think what they are doing is not correct. Perhaps I should have.

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What would you have done?