Transformation, not consultation, to end the abuse of children in Guyana’s schools
(Vidyaratha Kissoon lives in Guyana. He realised that beating children was wrong after doing anti-violence work with Help & Shelter and other organisations and individuals who recognised that we need to stop beating children as a cultural practice if we want to end gender based and other forms of violence)
Consultation
“She used to come in de class, beat everybody .. .. was she and de odder two man.. de three of dem.. now you cyan beat chirren in school, dem chirren gat knife and gun” the man said in the minibus.
The man continued talking about how he and his friends used to get away from school.
Similar memories across Guyana, across race, across generations, of the “good” teachers, the ones with weapons who brutalised children. And laughing at the memories of receiving licks while engaging in other forms of ‘breaking school rules’.
Newsroom reported on 21 November, 2022, “‘No black and blue’ – Manickchand issues stern warning to teachers abusing children.” By 25 November, 2022 Newsroom and Guyana Times reported that the Minister was now ‘hinting at consultations’ on the beating of children in Guyana’s schools.
The Ministry of Education has ‘guidelines’ on violence. The guidelines say that only the headteacher or someone appointed by the headteacher can beat children under their ‘care’. The headteacher must keep a log of each incident of corporal punishment. It isn’t clear if the guidelines include which weapons and the dimensions of the weapons which must be used in the implementation of the Ministry’s policy.
The Ministry of Education expects the headteachers to assume the role which was reserved for the slave owners, the magistrates and other colonial powers who decided which of the enslaved or indentured or other colonial subjects must be flogged for different offences. The suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 resulted in random floggings, and it doesn’t seem so far from the situation today in which we have good teachers who “beat everybody.”
In resorting to ‘hinting at consultation,’ the Ministry of Education assures the descendants of the enslaved and the indentured and other colonial subjects, that beating children would not be outlawed, but that the teachers must not leave marks and bruises on the children.
Or as many adults say ‘ gie dem two lash, just fuh hut dem,nah fuh abuse dem ‘ (Give them two lashes to hurt them, not to abuse them.”
In 2006, Alliance For Change (AFC) Parliamentarian Chantelle Smith tabled a motion to ban the beating of children in schools. There were requests for parliamentary submissions and consultations which continued for several years.
The consultations only confirmed the trauma in Guyana that many of us feel we deserve violence to be good – ‘gotaying’ the trauma rather than visioning a path to heal from it.
The National Assembly is resolute in fearing the adults who beat and preserved the violence of the colonial masters. The fear is evident even among those who said that they did not believe in beating children, but were too timid to change the law.
Since the last set of consultations, many teachers have beaten children, left marks and bruises and other scars on the bodies and the minds of children.
In January 2021, the Ministry of Human Services promised to launch a campaign “Say No To Beating Our Children,” directed at parents.
(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
The Ministry of Human Services did not do anything else, probably because the campaign would not align with the Ministry of Education’s apparent policy in the schools of “beating the children, but don’t bruise them.’ It would indeed have been strange to have a campaign to tell parents to stop beating while no such campaign was directed at teachers (many of whom are also parents). What would the message have been, you should beat in school, but not at home?
There are other stories of violence in schools, violence committed by children and violence experienced by children in school or close to schools.
There are no stories though of any teachers who have transformed or healed to come to an understanding that they do not have to inflict violence on the children for the children to learn.
There are no logs of any teachers who have been healed from their instincts to be violent, no reports of logs kept for the Ministry of Education to inspect that teachers have no intention of beating any child.
Transformation
In 2013, Andaiye made a submission to Parliament, reflecting on her experience as a headteacher who did not beat. The submission is in the collection “The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye” and is reproduced at the end of this column with permission of the editor.
Andaiye and other teachers and persons involved in education were committed to transforming Guyana’s education system. There are other quiet stories of teachers and parents who used to beat children and who stopped beating, or who used to believe that beating was necessary until they realised that it was not okay.
And in those stories, the teachers talk about keeping quiet because the staff rooms and the leadership of the Ministry of Education and other citizens do not want to change the law to ban the beating of children in the schools. The Ministry of Education, in holding on to the past trauma, misses the opportunity to create new guidelines for discipline which draws on the experiences of those teachers who are not beating.
Fortunately, Guyana did not have to succumb to the cultural views of the perpetrators of domestic violence, or the rapists and other persons who commit sexual offences, to pass legislation to ban domestic violence and sexual violence. Instead, the path of transformation to zero tolerance for violence included the milestone of getting the legislation in place to provide the environment for the work which has to be done. We need to ban the violence in schools if we are serious about zero tolerance for child abuse in Guyana.
Help & Shelter, Red Thread, ChildLink and other organisations and individuals do the work, which requires unlearning the need to be violent, recognising the need to heal from the traumas of experiences with violence and then learning new ways to be assertive with children and others while sharing humanity.
The Ministry of Education hopes to provide counsellors in schools. The Ministry of Education must also provide healing interventions for those who are not working immediately to ban corporal punishment in schools.
Andaiye’s 2013 testimony is included here, hopefully to be added to the testimonies of teachers who rebel against the Ministry’s current policies by condemning the beating of children in Guyana’s schools.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: Submission on the attitude of Guyanese, especially parents and children, to corporal punishment and its possible abolition My name is Andaiye and I am a member of Red Thread which is making other submissions, but I also want to make a brief one in my own name.
More than 40 years ago, when I was 27 or 28 years old, I was an acting head teacher, part of an experiment introduced by then Minister of Education Shirley FieldRidley, to see whether young head teachers could break with the old authoritarian practices of our schools, including corporal punishment. The day I informed staff members that there would be no beating in our school, a teacher near retirement age told me that I had taken away his “authority.”
I believed then, as I do now, that in the relationship between teacher and student the teacher has to have authority. I understand that it’s not a relationship between equivalents. Equals but not equivalents. These are two people of different ages, different levels of experience, different responsibilities, and different roles to play in ensuring that the school carry out its teaching/learning function. But I was amazed then, and I remain amazed now, that any adult
would be willing to signal to a child that the basis of his/her “authority” is a cane or a ruler or a belt or a whip. Just like the man on a horse, subduing enslaved women and men with his whip while they seethe inside with a rage that will either burst out in rebellion or be turned inwards.
I don’t tell this (true) story because I’m unaware that conditions in the society and therefore in our schools have changed drastically. I tell it only because what I hear proponents of corporal punishment in our schools saying today is exactly what my colleague was saying to me all
those many years ago: that removing the teacher’s right to inflict corporal punishment removes his/ her authority. What they really mean is that it alters the power relation between
teacher and student in favor of the student; it makes it impossible to get the student to submit. But submission should not be what we want to teach.
I grew up at a time when few would argue against the proposition that corporal punishment was not only acceptable but necessary. Various letter writers of my generation have argued that it is because we “got licks” that we’ve turned out well. These included men whom I knew (not thought, knew) to be wife-beaters. They had never been taught how to reason. Reason is what we need to teach.
No one I know is advocating that teachers who have been taught reliance on corporal punishment be suddenly cast adrift without any knowledge of alternative ways of exercising authority. What we want an end to is a policy that says that hitting any adult is a bad, even a criminal act, while hitting a child is for his/her own good.
All human history is a battle between two broad tendencies: one, pushing for expanding rights and freedoms, the other, resisting change and holding on to a status quo which works for those who have power. I’m not a great believer that parliament as an institution can lead change, but I would never deny that in Guyana, successive parliaments — some with a PNC majority, others with a PPP majority — have done a good job of increasing the legal rights of women in particular, especially their right to live free of violence. Those changes in the law
were opposed too, sometimes from within the parties themselves. No one took a poll to ask the people whether they agreed that it was wrong to beat women, not because they were less democratic than you are, but because — talk for sun, talk for rain — they had the courage not to hide behind a pretense of democratic consultation.
You can do no less for Guyana’s children.
Yours sincerely,
Andaiye