CRUELTY

by Goolbai Gunesekere

Sri Lankans are not known to be a cruel race, yet instances of outright wickedness are now rearing their ugly heads. We used to be shocked by the stories of little servant girls being abused by Sri Lankan housewives and viciously punished for minor infractions.

I remember one case of a little 10-year-old village child in the house of a teacher (I think) who was beaten unmercifully for eating a piece of cheese. The subsequent wounds sustained by the little girl were bad enough to have the lady concerned hauled up before a judge. I do not remember if she was given a sentence or just warned.

Hiring child servants is against the law and yet it used to be broken with impunity – until now. The Police are making regular checks we are glad to note. Children have had a difficult time when they were made servants because they were usually placed in very middle-class homes where they were often the only house help and were therefore thoroughly overworked.

But my concern today is cruelty in schools where narrow minded and poorly educated Principals act like petty dictators secure in the knowledge that to dismiss them from their jobs is almost impossible. They have the audacity to use political influence to act as they please. Nepotism is rampant I am told_ This is not confined only to Principals but also to teachers who seem to vent their frustrations on the children in their classes. I have to ask ‘What on earth is the Department of Education thinking? Do they have no control over the personnel appointed?

I am told that Red Tape is responsible for this situation of Principals and teachers being virtually unassailable once they are appointed.

Principals and teachers are often poorly educated. When I speak of being poorly educated I do not mean that they lack a basic Degree. A Degree is obviously a must, but a basic Degree is hardly adequate for Principals. Have they been schooled further in the art of handling children? Do they have qualities of patience, kindliness and sympathy in addition to strong (not cruel) disciplinary skills? Are they mature and responsible people without any psychological problems of their own which hamper proper understanding of the children in the school? In Finland a teacher needs to have a master’s degree before teaching is possible.

Remember the newspaper story where a teacher got her class to physically abuse their own classmate for not cleaning the class (or some such silly reason) and the whole form did so? I find it interesting that these instances that appear in the Press usually refer to girls’ schools and rarely to boys. Are women just less kind and are men more generous minded?

Not so. Men are just as appallingly behaved if one takes note of the frequent sexual assaults made by male teachers on students which are regularly reported in the Press. But it seems as if it is the female student who suffers most.

Parents are singularly powerless much of the time. The reason is not hard to find. Their children have been given `placement’ in a Government school with some difficulty. Parents learn to keep their mouths shut if they want their children to go through school without too much of a hassle. Principals and teachers (I speak mostly of the outstations) are NEVER brought to book for mean or vicious treatment of those in their care. Parents would not dare to risk their child’s `place’ by being critical of a teacher or a Principal. Where else could they send their child?

I now come to the recent highly publicized case of a Principal summarily expelling a girl because she threw up in school. The child came from an extremely poor family and I must ask if the Principal would have thrown her out so fast had she been the daughter of the area Mudalali who had the power and the means to fight back?

I listened to the girl’s mother being interviewed on TV a few night ago. She was understandably distraught. It was bad enough that the Principal had declared her daughter pregnant (when apparently she wasn’t) just because she vomited in class, but that the villagers in the area were now asking the family to move from their home because of the shame of an unwanted pregnancy in their midst.

The sanctimoniousness of those villagers defies belief…. and their cruelty to a family already under stress is truly appalling. They add hypocrisy to all this, and one wonders what their religious beliefs have done for them. One feels that any saying similar to the Bible words, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” should be dinned into the heads of every person who deals with youngsters.

How SHOULD that Principal have behaved if she suspected one of her pupils was pregnant? To start off it would have been a good idea if she had a serious and private talk with the young girl and asked for her story (if she had one.) If the child WAS pregnant then she obviously needed help and a great deal of sympathy. She might have been raped or even been the victim of incest. Why would the Principal jump to the conclusion that the pregnancy was the result of a passionate sexual encounter and therefore damn the child for life?

This is not the first time I have heard that there is a great deal of cruelty in schools. I hear of it professionally as well as personally. On a personal note, I hear of my Kandy maid’s grandchild being constantly asked for money for costumes, picnics, educational trips, even dance trips abroad while my

Colombo based daily maid’s son goes to a good school in Kotte which provides everything a child needs – from costumes to trips.

The Kandy maid needs constant advances to pay for her grandchildren’s extracurricular activities. I thought all this asking for money was supervised by the Department of Education? Some Principals must be making a great deal of money and this pressure on parents for money can also be deemed cruelty of a sort.

This underlying vein of cruelty will always hamper Sri Lankans from progressing as they should. Educators can see that the study of religion in school is not doing a whit of good. Leave religion for parents to handle and families may grow closer together as they teach their sons and daughters the correct values of life. Leaving Ethical Values to be taught by the sort of teachers that are now doing so is a waste of time.

Cruelty is part of the struggle of life. We can all be cruel, and we often unconsciously are, but at least let us not use authority and power to deal viciously with our youth in schools. Once they get to University, of course, discipline is another matter! Perhaps if students had a sympathetic and understanding school career they may be better able to deal with higher studies which they are now totally unable to handle.

Here is a good adage for every Principal to follow: – “Only he deserves power who every day justifies it”.

(From the Principal Factor first published in Lanka Market Digest)