Related to my earlier post, I want to continue my discussion of corporal punishment in Ghanaian schools to include the overall violence I’ve seen here, because I think they are related.
Horseplay, especially among the younger boys, during school time breaks here at Manye is more aggressive than anything I remember growing up. They play a game in the school yard where I gather there are two teams and the point is for each side to run around and try to kick the shin of a boy on the other team. Almost all the boys have some nice scars on their legs. Also in class, small disputes or minor incidents turn into small scuffles shockingly fast. If a child takes his friend’s pencil or workbook (often because he/she doesn’t have one of their own), the proper response seems to be to smack the offender in the head or give some other form of student-on-student discipline. The first child, now feeling wronged, usually responds in kind and a small tussle breaks out. And even when students are trying to be helpful by silencing their disruptive peer, it is often done with a smack – in perfect imitation of what they see their teacher do each day. I think the level of violence directed at the children in their daily lives has a big impact on their interactions with each other.
And beyond the violence in the school, I am sure that beating is routine for misbehavior in the home. And I expect that most parents would be upset if their child wasn’t getting beaten for disobedience at school. It is part of the general culture and educational system here. It’s how they were raised. It’s safe and familiar to them. Discipline, obedience, and respect for elders are highly valued traits in Ghanaian society. Corporal punishment is the means for enforcing those values.
Based on all this, it’s hard to see a way to change the system of caning in the school in the near future. I think it will ultimately require a larger change in mindset among the people here. My small and very poor attempts at classroom management based on my values (mutual respect, not raising my voice, emphasizing disappointment over anger) have been met with total chaos. The children have lived in an environment, enforced both at school and at home, where discipline is maintained through force and the threat of force. It would take a very long-term, consistent effort to make the kind of change I would like to see in a classroom. On top of that challenge, the teacher would likely face constant pressure from parents to return to ‘traditional’ methods of teaching. And unless the entire school was changed, the children would eventually move on to a teacher who enforced discipline through fear of punishment, undoing all the effort done in previous years.
Maybe there is some hope, however. I’ve learned that corporal punishment has been completely phased out of university education, which is certainly an important development. Caning in the final two years of high school, I believe, has also been prohibited. And I think there is movement to eliminate, or at least reduce, caning in JHS 3 (equivalent to ninth grade) here at Manye. This is the highest grade Manye teaches, so possibly it could trickle down from there. And as more students graduate from a system where physical punishment was a less and less important part of their educational experience, they may become more open to reducing caning on their own children. I see the elimination of caning in Ghanaian schools as a long-term, but entirely possible, development that I hope could be sped along.
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