Corporal punishment – usually referring to adults hitting children – was abolished in South Africa in 1997. The Constitutional Court had already ruled it incompatible with the bill of rights in 1995. In that judgement, the chief justice said that in his view, “juvenile whipping is cruel, it is inhuman and it is degrading” – as well as “unnecessary”. The South African Schools Act of 1996 also outlawed it. Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that this practice is still common in many schools and homes. Educational psychologist Simangele Mayisela researched the subject for her 2017 doctorate, asking why some teachers and parents (and even children) believed it was an effective and harmless form of discipline.
How did you study the roots of this behaviour?
My PhD research used observations and interviews at a rural public school in a low-income area in South Africa to investigate the historical and socio-cultural origins of corporal punishment. I wanted to understand how teachers’ childhood and cultural exposure to corporal punishment had influenced their use of it, and how punishing children this way could affect their development.
There hadn’t been much research about how corporal punishment in schools could be passed on in culture from one generation to the next.
Under the oppressive apartheid regime’s system of “Bantu Education”, which aimed to keep black people subservient to white people, corporal punishment was widely used.
But even after South Africa became a democracy in 1994, this practice continued.
What did you see that suggested teachers had a deep belief about corporal punishment?
There were numerous examples.
I observed a grade 4 social science lesson on the types and functions of landmarks. The teacher used the example of Table Mountain in Cape Town as a natural landmark and the Ponte City tower in Johannesburg as a manmade landmark. One boy in the classroom raised his hand and, before he was called on to speak, said: “Sir, here in our village Ntabande (a hill) is a natural landmark and the Vilakazi tavern is a manmade landmark”. The teacher was angry because the boy had spoken without permission, and promised him a “hiding” after the lesson.
I also attended a community meeting about various issues, including scholar transport. The chief asked parents to give their children a hiding if they didn’t get to the bus on time. The message for teachers and parents was that traditional authority encouraged corporal punishment.
Study participants told me that parents supported the practice of teachers physically punishing their children.
In another sign of how people in this community thought about order, discipline, punishment and reward, I saw various kinds of sticks at the school where I did my research. They were not all used for inflicting pain; some were used for pointing to charts, for example. They had different names indicating different functions and intentions. In interviews, children referred to sticks as umqondisi (a person who makes something straight, puts things in order), uphiphizinyefu (cleaner of your mess), or “sweets”.
In the early childhood development class, children started the morning by reciting rhymes and moving their little bodies in meaningful imitative rhythm. One of the rhymes has this line:
Shaya tishela, shaya tishela, shaya tishela (hit the child, teacher).
What did teachers and children say about it?
In focus groups and interviews, generations of teachers (retired and working) said that when they were children, it was normal to be beaten at home and at school. It was hard to avoid being beaten, even if you behaved well.
It was not something to negotiate.
Yet they were grateful to their teachers for having used corporal punishment. They believed there was a direct relationship between that form of “discipline” and their academic success. It had enabled them to become teachers themselves. One teacher described it as “the very instrument that made you who you are”. And academic success was what they wanted for the children they were teaching.
Some could still recite things they had “learned” by rote as children. One mentioned how, when they were children, the teacher would walk around the classroom as learners wrote their essays, and unleash the “hookaai” (also a word for a whip used on animals) on them for spelling mistakes. The same kind of experience was described by the current generation of children in the study.
The teachers even referred to corporal punishment as “sweets” – making it sound like a reward.
In the way they spoke, the participants did not separate corporal punishment from the teaching and learning process. They seemed to think of the three – teaching, learning and beating – as one activity.
In my class there is a stick … I made sure that I leave no mark on a child.
Teachers believed that corporal punishment encouraged children to focus:
The person (child) begins to think.
All three generations of teachers in the study accepted corporal punishment as normal. They took this humiliating experience lightly, laughing about it. In psychology, this is a sign of coping and acceptance.
Several teachers spoke of it as part of their culture: “We believe that we must raise a child with a stick.”
Children had already internalised that idea. One said: “At home they say every child needs to be beaten.” And they believed they had called it upon themselves: “It’s me who has started her (the teacher)”. This created feelings of guilt: “If we start them, the teachers feel the pain”. Children also laughed when talking about punishment.
Of all the children interviewed, only one indicated that being beaten made him think about why he’d done what he did.
What are the outcomes of this disciplinary approach?
Being exposed to corporal punishment all the time made the community see it as a normal tool for raising children.
It appeared that teachers believed that corporal punishment produced desired behaviour from a child. But this was mainly from the child’s avoidance of physical pain, not from understanding what was “wrong” about their behaviour.
Read more: Four reasons why physically punishing school children doesn't work
In a classroom where children are motivated by avoiding pain and ridicule, there is little development of higher mental functions. Fear and anxiety interfere with thought processing, hindering development and learning. It’s likely to affect the development of psychological functions related to discipline like problem-solving, self-regulation and agency.
For instance, in this study, I observed two siblings from a child-headed family coming late for the whole week while I was at the school, and they would be beaten every day for latecoming. When I engaged with the siblings, they simply said they woke up late and their brother, in high school, also got to school late. They had not learned to solve the problem of being late for school and to regulate their sleep and waking up pattern. In line with education policy, these learners are an example of children experiencing social and economic learning barriers.
The reliance on corporal punishment as a discipline measure deprives children of a chance to discover for themselves what is true and right, and the knowledge and experience they will need in adulthood.
This study was funded by the National Research Fund (NRF) and Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Simangele Mayisela is a registered Educational Psychologist, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand and a Board Member of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Renciliation (CSVR).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
