GROWING up in the small village of Makapanstad in the North West in the late '80s, going to school by then needed to be perfected if you knew very well what could be awaiting you.
Punishment was the order of the back then. When one arrived late at school, misbehaved or even achieved low grades, punishment was there for everything.
One would be embarrassed by the teachers when told to collect all the rubbish around the schoolyard, being paraded during the assembly proceedings in the morning, or even being told to sing in the sun for the whole period.
Those were the punishments all pupils could take, except the trauma of seeing a teacher holding his or her notorious stick, which would land on your buttocks, hands or anywhere in your body.
When failing some subjects, some pupils barely improved despite being tortured by the stick, wooden chalkboard cleaner, and plastic pipes. Our understanding of subjects in those days was different, and some, if not most, did not improve. They only needed special attention, not a stick on their bum.
In those days, we learnt that some kids dropped out of school because of the corporal punishment they endured, which never helped them. Many went to seek work at a young age as they thought the notorious stick and schooling were not for them.
It made no difference those days when one would be corporally punished at school because going home to tell parents about your beatings would only make matters worse.
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For such reasons, corporal punishment in Mzansi was banned.
It was regarded as a crime and referred to as assault. According to section27.gov.za in 1996, the South African Schools Act, under Section 10, banned corporal punishment. And in 2000, this was confirmed in the Christian Education case.
Despite the ban on corporal punishment 20 years ago, teachers still harshly hit kids at schools. The recent case is of an 11-year-old grade 5 pupil in the North West who was allegedly beaten with a chalkboard duster at Bakubung Intermediate School for making a noise in 2021.
According to her mother, her child’s life is doomed as she can’t use her left hand anymore and hasn’t been to school since the incident.
Another horrific story is that of Yvonne Ramoba, who is now 34. She was moered by a teacher at school in Limpopo in 2001 while she was just 12 years old in 2001 with a cricket bat on her leg. Even today, Yvonne hasn’t seen justice and is still living with a disability after what the teacher did.
Nothing else can be painted nicely about corporal punishment.
Such action remains as physical assault and an assault on human dignity. Teachers must stop abusing kids and work on understanding the pupils' frustrations that lead to them being underperformers and misbehaviours.
