By IANS
New Delhi : “Spare the rod – it won’t spoil the child” so goes the title of a book compiled by 1,591 children from four states with cartoons showing children being beaten or getting their ears pulled to highlight the high prevalence of corporal punishment in schools and homes.
Written in an easy-to-understand manner, the book released Tuesday is a product of research carried out in 41 government schools in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh.
Nine-year-old Sultana of Delhi, one of the kids who was part of the book making, said that corporal punishment is very common in her school and home.
“If we don’t do our homework, then we get beaten up by our teachers. When we were drawing the cartoons for the book, a boy sitting next to me said that he has experienced similar punishment.
“That’s why our drawings depict young children being beaten up by a rod or getting our ears pulled by teachers and parents,” Sultana told IANS.
The book is based on a study conducted by Plan India, an organisation which works to secure the rights of children.
K. Kannan of Plan India said that two workshops, one in Delhi and the other in Uttar Pradesh, were held for the children and they were asked to express themselves through caricatures on what their idea was about an ideal school, how do they view their teachers and what their interaction with their teachers was like.
“The workshops were conducted after our team had visited the schools and interacted with the teachers, students and parents separately. What we concluded at the end of the study was that corporal punishment was seen as a necessary tool to bring up children.
According to Kannan, the book would inculcate the need for “positive disciplining” among teachers and parents, and also make children aware of it.
In one school, a teacher admitted to hitting children saying she was left with no other option.
“There are too many children in my class and I have a lot of teaching task on my hands. Then, we are always running short of time to complete the syllabus. All of this leaves me with no option but to resort to corporal punishment to control the class,” one teacher said.
Randeep Kaur, children advisor of Plan India, said that there is almost always a power struggle between the teacher and the student and the parent and the child, all of which leads to the child being on the wrong side of the rod.
States like Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Chandigarh, West Bengal, Orissa and Tamil Nadu have banned corporal punishment in schools, but as the study saw, in two of the states – Delhi and Andhra Pradesh- it very much exists despite the ban.
The book is in English and will be translated into Hindi and distributed among school children in 10 states, including the ones where the study has been conducted.
The 10 states include Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand.
Plan India will also launch a Young Hearts campaign in which they will launch the Model School Initiative – on creating an ideal school in which there is no violence. “In the language of the children, there are only happy faces in the school and no sad ones,” said Kannan.