Suffer the little children
This is the report of how it happened.
A little boy complains to a teacher that three little girls pushed him. The teacher calls the girls, gives them paper balls to hold in their hands, threatens to whip them if they drop the paper balls - and then he Sets.The.Paper.On.Fire.
Apparently the idea was that the girl who was guilty would drop the burning paper ball.
There were, reportedly, three other teachers who stood and watched as one little girl, then another, dropped the burning paper ball.
Halima Khatun, the third little girl, was terrified. She held on tightly to the burning wad of paper - burning her hand up to her wrist.
The three little girls were then made to wait in the staff room while their parents were called. Halima, too, waited - with blisters on her hands, and no medication, not even first aid - for the hour and a half that it took for her mother to reach the school.
Apparently, by the time her mother arrived, the little girl couldn’t even cry.
Halima Khatun was the first child in her family to go to school. Her father is a daily-wage labourer.
Now she doesn’t want to go back to school - ever.
*****
I’m appalled by the reported statement of this teacher-in-charge: “He has done it on the spur of the moment. He had no wish to physically torture the students.â€?
Or maybe I’m not surprised. There’s usually a tendency to stick together, isn’t there - to try and explain away this sort of thing. But schools must be dealing with children’s quarrels every day, so sorry - spur-of-the-moment is not an excuse.
The reports mention that the school has offered to bear the “costs” of the girl’s treatment. I expect they mean the costs of doctor’s fees and medical supplies. I wonder what will be done to assuage the child’s trauma and help her heal.
I have always believed that children don’t themselves “drop out” from the education system. They are either pushed out (as in this case) or pulled out by family circumstances. And there are so many, many elements that conspire to keep children out of school, especially the girl child. Sometimes they’re pushed out of school by the lack of a separate toilet for girls; sometimes by the need to look after younger siblings at home; sometimes by angry and frustrated teachers; sometimes by the lack of any teachers….*
And on a different note, what’s with this agni pariksha thing? What’s with some Angry Person wanting to turn upon and investigate a girl’s truthfulness/loyalty/insert-whichever-word-here using physical violence? If they want to know whether a girl has done something “wrong”, why don’t they just ask her?
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* Female literacy rate in India: 54.16% as per the 2001 Census. Gender gap in literacy 21.70%.
Hi,
My maid’s boys study at the local government school run by MCD(Municiapl Corp. of Delhi).The younger one is in 5th standard, and there is only one teacher per class to teach all the subjects.It is th norm that only half the number of classes take place.While the other boy is in 8th standard,where for the first half of the session there are no classes at all, and there are few teachers, who are on beating spree ; beatig students for wearing slippers and dirty clothes, while they temselves wear crushed and dirty clothes and the bata slippers, with the grown beards.
And I have to stop these guys from dropping out twice.They are just not interested to go to school.The elder one can not read a single sentence in English or he can not even rad hindi fluently.However, when I teach them computers or to consult a dictionary, they do it just like I did when I was taught for the first time.Fundamentally there seems to be no difference between them and the priviliged ones.
Is there really a way out? I constantly moniter their progress, which is none, and it is one of the most depressing things .
So there is something really wrong with the whole system and just not the teachers, who are sucked into this inefficient ,destructive, noperforming and degraded system.
Comment by abhishek — August 3, 2006 @ 5:55 pm
“I have always believed that children don’t themselves “drop outâ€? from the education system. They are either pushed out (as in this case) or pulled out by family circumstances”
Agree completely. Though it’s by no means a problem only for girls. Plenty of boys get pulled out of school because their families need to put them to work earning money. Oh, and logically, literacy figures are more relevant to initial enrollment, not so much to school drop-outs.
The teacher’s behaviour (as well as the apathy of the other school staff) is horrendous, and I hope the #&%$@! gets the punishment he deserves. And I’m amazed that the school would say “He didn’t mean to torture anyone - it was just a spontaneous act” as a defense. Even if that were true, which I don’t for a minute believe, how criminally stupid does that make this teacher?
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’m intrigued by the genderist tone of your post - nothing I’ve read about the incident suggests to me that the fact that all three victims of this test were girls is anything more than ooincidence. This Maiti guy is just a cruel, sadistic bastard. I doubt that he would have been less violent had his victims been boys.
Comment by Falstaff — August 3, 2006 @ 5:55 pm
Absolutely disgusting. There are just too many stories in the news these days of little children suffering for the stupidity and pig-headedness of adults and the war mongering, hatred spreading and just plain cruelty they seem to revel in indulging.
Comment by Sujatha — August 3, 2006 @ 5:57 pm
The teacher must have flunked his “Education in The Medieval Times” course. Didn’t he know kids readily confess their crimes if they are first made to walk on burning coals?
Comment by km — August 3, 2006 @ 6:22 pm
Suffer the little children
nice..
Trackback by fernandopico — August 3, 2006 @ 7:58 pm
What kind of atrocity is this? Nobody deserves a punishment this bad when they are only ten years old. This teacher Suresh must be put in jail.
Comment by Nithya — August 3, 2006 @ 9:24 pm
Headmaster Shibram Mukherjee said Maity would be punished if he was found guilty.
IF he was found guilty?
I am speechless.
It is appalling to see how the perpetrators band together (Im including all the teachers who stood by watching silently)…you would think that the headmaster would have better sense….:(
Comment by megha — August 3, 2006 @ 10:44 pm
I wish I could visit the school on 5 September to attend their Teachers’ Day celebrations. Any form of corporal punishment is horrendous; it institutionalises and validates in learning minds the idea of violence as a means to an end, of violence as purposeful and human. But what really beats me is this kind of corporal punishment - beating students to death, burning their hands. Teachers’ Day should not be to celebrate teachers but to get all teachers to sit through a compulsory session with a counsellor.
Comment by Shivam Vij — August 4, 2006 @ 12:45 am
Abhishek, thanks for sharing your experience. There seems to be so much anger within the system.
Suj, km, nithya - it’s frightening to think what kids are being put through - I can’t even begin to think about the children who have died in the war.
Megha: that worries me too. You’d think one of the teachers would have the sense to intervene. This mindset and this complete abuse of trust is deeply disturbing.
Shivam: Maybe there should be a counsellor available round the year, if not for each school, then a panel of counsellors sent to visit a set of schools at regular intervals?
Falstaff, thanks for adding your views. Yes, of course “dropping out” of the school system is a problem for boys as well as girls, which is what I wrote in my post: “there are so many, many elements that conspire to keep children out of school, especially the girl child.“. It’s also a dismal reality that more girls do drop out than boys, and the dropout rates reflect this.
I have pointed to the female literacy rate and the gender gap in the literacy rate not in relation to dropout rates, but to show starkly one of the end results of our neglect of primary education - close to half of India’s women cannot read or write. (Even among those who drop out after some early years of schooling, their reading / writing skills are likely to go unreinforced in the real world outside, with the result that they lose much of their reading/writing competence)
As for the gender slant - I fully agree that if the kids had been boys, it’s possible, even very likely this teacher would have behaved in the same way. But as it happens it was a male teacher who punished the girls, and while I’m not suggesting that it happened because the teacher was a man and the students were girls, I’m not sure I would rule out those nuances either, in the absence of a more detailed news report. I’m just pointing to this very real “agni pariksha” ( “trial by fire” - it was Sita who was put through the first one, after all, in the Ramayana) because it becomes one more example of the difficulties in the path of girl children wanting to get an education. Apart from poverty, parental attitudes, low & fragile self-esteem, the lack of separate toilet facilities and other such factors, the shortage of women teachers is also a barrier to girls’ education - and this kind of incident doesn’t help.
Comment by Uma — August 4, 2006 @ 4:16 am
I’m just shocked. I don’t even know what else to say about what’s happened to these kids.
I completely agree with your observation on children being pushed/pulled out of schools. Before issues like literacy can even be discussed, there is a far greater need to consider whether the environment in which such education will be provided is conducive — along many variables — to the basic health and mental wellbeing of its recipients. There are many hidden costs to obtaining an education, other than the obvious financial ones, and these need to be dealt with before substantial progress can even be imagined.
Comment by Sharanya — August 4, 2006 @ 4:50 am
Disgusting. Is it ignorance? Lack of proper education for the teachers? Personal frustration showing out on children? Or, are they just plain insane?
Comment by Kishore — August 4, 2006 @ 8:54 am
This is really shocking. IS this person a techer or a sadist? The reaction of the staff is even more pathetic
Comment by Nikhil — August 4, 2006 @ 9:59 am
Its high time, corporal punishment should be banned in all schools particularly govt. ones.
In my school(private) it was banned.
This kind of punishment is very destructive and leads to nowhere in students personality and growth.
I am afraid that The meaning of PUMISHMENT is changing!
Comment by Raj Shrikant — August 4, 2006 @ 10:41 am
* mouth wide open *
Shit, I cannot believe this. Human beings are mean…
Comment by Apurva — August 4, 2006 @ 1:02 pm
This is really horrible. How did he even think of doing something so ghastly.
By the way, those literacy figures are from 2001 census, AFAIK. I really hope the situation is much better now. Also, the way this census is done is that if he/she knows how to write his/her name, he/she is considered literate!
Comment by Sneha — August 4, 2006 @ 1:11 pm
Uma: Fair enough. Though I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the large chunk of that difference in education comes from lack of enrollment of women in schools. A 1997 World Bank report found that drop out rates between grades 1 and 5 were 45% for girls and 41% for boys (see: http://www.census.gov/ipc/prod/wid-9801.pdf)
That may be a statistically significant difference, but it certainly suggests that the larger issue is higher drop-out rates across children - the problem isn’t that much worse for girls.
As Sneha points out, given the way literacy is defined, even basic schooling will get you counted as literate, so I suspect that the 46% illiteracy among women is far more reflective of lack of enrollment than of drop-outs. Obviously, the quality of schools has something to do with lack of enrollment, but I’m not sure that it’s the dominant factor. You may want to look at a paper by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon in the Journal of Development Studies Dec 2002 - in which she decomposes the reasons for low enrollment and attainment for men and women in Uttar Pradesh. The key factors there are caste, parental education status, income levels and religion. Quality of schools plays much less of a role.
On a more positive note, notice that the continuing gender gap notwithstanding, the overall trend in female literacy is heartening. In 1971 female literacy was about 20%, in 1991 it was about 40% - if it’s 54% now, then clearly things are getting better. obviously 54% is nowhere near good enough, but it’s not like the problem isn’t being addressed. And an improvement of almost 40% in ten years in female literacy rates in the country the size of India is not an achievement to scoff at.
I do continue to think that you’re being overly paranoid about the gender implications of the fire-test. Trial by fire is hardly an exclusively Indian concept or a test meant only for women. My mythology is fairly rusty, but didn’t that Dhruv guy emerge unscathed from a fire, and wasn’t that before the whole Ram-Sita deal? That this incident is despicable is unequivocal, that it had anything to do with the gender of its victims is, in the absence of much stronger evidence, a huge and entirely unsubstantiated leap. I for one would like to know how this teacher has been treating his male students. I’d be very surprised if he hasn’t been brutal with them as well. There’s enough genuine gender discrimination out there for us not to need to invent conspiracy theories about it where there’s little reason to believe it exists.
From my own (admittedly anecdotal) observation of Municipal Schools in Bombay, corporal punishment is, if anything, more of an issue for boys than it is for girls - the assumption is that boys are supposed to be ‘tough’ and so it’s legitimate to beat them. So while I agree that there are innumerable reasons why the education system continues to be biased against the girl child, I’m unconvinced that greater threat of corporal punishment is one of them. And I’m having a hard time imagining that parents who would otherwise be sending their girls to school will withdraw them because some sadistic lunatic went out of control and burned a girl’s hand. Oh, and why are we assuming that the absence of women teachers had anything to do with this? I don’t know that some of the teachers standing around watching this happen weren’t women. Or that women teachers aren’t capable of sadistic corporal punishment.
Comment by Falstaff — August 4, 2006 @ 2:42 pm
Suffer the little children
A little boy complains to a teacher that three little girls pushed him. The teacher calls the girls, gives them paper balls to hold in their hands, threatens to whip them if they drop the paper balls - and then he Sets.The.Paper.On.Fire.
Uma is apalled…
Trackback by DesiPundit — August 4, 2006 @ 3:33 pm
This is just too shocking, Uma. Too sickening.
Comment by Abi — August 4, 2006 @ 4:54 pm
Corporal punishement does not only take place in municipal schools.There are millions of children who are beaten by the elders on the pretext of acting in their welfare. I know about a boarding school, which specializes in admitting students(only boys), and then reforming them with the gentle caress of the cane, painting the canvas of skin with various signs of beating.
So, beating and physical torture/abuse is not prevalent in the schools , rather it is present in our mindset.Now, how shall we change the mindset?
This is also a question.
Comment by abhishek — August 4, 2006 @ 6:18 pm
Sick. Horrible.
And who knows how many incidents like this are never reported.
Comment by Truman — August 5, 2006 @ 6:32 am
I’m speechless by the teacher’s actions. It makes sense to me that any child in the classroom that witness this torture wouldn’t ever want to go to school again.
Comment by Ms. World — August 5, 2006 @ 5:18 pm
It isn’t limited to muncipal schools. I grew up in Bombay, and went to a Catholic Convent private school. Beatings were a daily part of the school day. One of my friends got beat so bad she had red welts all over her face. I think she slept during class or something. There are other forms of mental and physical abuses too. Brutal world, convent schools.
Comment by sonia — August 5, 2006 @ 9:26 pm