Educationist Daniel Fenyi has called for the reduction of extreme discipline on school children.
He was speaking on Campus Exclusive yesterday over the role of discipline in line with student’s health in various schools.
This comes after a 13-year-old JHS 2 student allegedly lost his life after being subjected to corporal punishment by his teacher for making errors in his homework.
On the issue of disciplinary measures for children, Mr. Fenyi stated that students should be allowed to make mistakes as part of their growth process.
He called on teachers to stop having high expectations from their student’s in an attempt to only discipline them.
“We shouldn’t always be expecting extremely disciplinary actions from children, expecting them to be very neat, iron their dresses, take their books, read them, etc. These are activities characteristic of adults and not for children. They’ll be playing football, their uniforms will be very dirty, their books will be torn. But these are all the things put together, that make them children. And these are very relevant features that will help them to also grow as well. When we teach our teachers some of these children’s psychological behaviors, I think our teachers will be more tolerant when their children are playing around.”
Mr. Fenyi contends that the cause of the student’s death is debatable. He claims that the student in question could have died due to any other factor.
He however emphasized on the need to punish students diligently with love and care, rather than with anger.
“The other part of the argument is that it couldn’t be the cane that killed the child. For those of us who know the story, you would know that the child had some underlying health conditions. We are tempted to believe that it is nearly coincidental that the teacher caned and the child died. I think there are two separate events which happened very coincidentally. It is a bit difficult to exonerate the teacher. One thing that is clear is that the teacher administered the cane out of anger. The policies are no use of the cane. Even if you are going to breach the policy and use cane, it shouldn’t be out of anger. It should be more out of love and genuine concern to correct children.”
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Story by | Deborah Yakohene | univers.ug.edu.gh
