Cruelty has no place in the classroom

What do a three-year-old boy in outer Delhi’s Maujpur, a six-year-old boy in Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam, a 10-year-old girl in east Delhi’s Vinod Nagar and a 16-year-old girl in Haryana’s Faridabad have in common? Avoidable tragedy.

The parents of all four children have alleged that they suffered cruelty at the hands of teachers and school staff, in some cases involving allegations of inhuman punishment or irate teachers lashing out. In Maujpur, the boy was allegedly tied to a chair for hours and subjected to severe physical abuse over several days at a playschool. In Visakhapatnam, police said the boy collapsed in the classroom and died after being slapped by his teacher for not completing his homework. In Vinod Nagar, a 10-year-old girl collapsed and died in hospital after allegedly being made to stand at the back of her class as punishment for forgetting to bring a book. In Faridabad, the student jumped from the third-floor terrace of her school building after allegedly being made to stand in the sun for several hours as punishment.

The allegations are serious and deserve an open and transparent investigation that doesn’t try to brush the facts under the carpet. But beyond the particulars of these cases, the four cases point towards a disturbing trend of schools and teachers failing to move on with the times and continuing with outdated forms of instruction and punishment. India has both a learning outcome and school dropout problem — annual ACER reports show that across India, students cannot read or solve mathematical problems at several levels below their own, and UDISE surveys underline serious problems of dropout at the secondary school level. These are the gaps in education that schools and educators should be focussing on, not on devising cruel and unusual forms of punishment.