Video: Save your job from trouble, don’t cane students – NAGRAT President urges teachers
Save your job from trouble, don’t cane students – NAGRAT President urges teachers
The Ghana Education Service (GES) has issued a directive prohibiting teachers from caning children. As a result, NAGRAT Prez Angel Carbonu has advised its members not to disobey this order.
According to the group, following the instruction to the letter would protect them from any retaliatory action taken by the service.
All schools have been ordered by the GES to immediately implement a new disciplinary toolset and alternative punishments to canning as a means of disciplining kids and children in the classroom.
Though the move has been met with a range of opinions, many have voiced support for it, saying that instructors are being overzealous in their efforts to curb bad student behaviour.
However, Angel Carbonu, president of NAGRAT, thinks that physical punishment is the best method to discipline children, therefore he cautioned teachers to beware of whatever penalty the GES could impose on them if they don’t comply.
Mr. Carbonu said on CITI TV’s The Point of View that the association has no choice except to embrace the ruling, abide by it, and let history decide the results.
“In the new code of conduct for teachers, it is stated clearly that when a teacher beats a student, the teacher will be arraigned before the disciplinary committee depending on the gravity of the situation.
“Therefore, I call on my teachers that as we speak today, there is a ban on corporal punishment. If you are a Maths or English teacher, go to the school and teach, carry your books and move out so that you will not be arraigned before a court that you have battered their child so that you are saved.”
“The conclusion that teachers cane students irresponsibly to make students timid is [problematic]. Although we know there are excesses, we will not oppose the ban. We’ll welcome any disciplinary approach GES brings but the outcome will determine whether it is right or wrong”, he stressed.
Cultural ways of discipline
Reacting to assertions that most foreign countries have long ago put an end to this form of corporal punishment, the NAGRAT president rejected such comments because he thinks it was clear for Ghana to contextualise its way of improving discipline.
“Disciplining a child needs to be put in a social context. It should reflect the kind of society we find ourselves in. So bringing the prescription of a western society will not necessarily be workable in our environment because we won’t get the same outcome.
“We should therefore find a workable way of correcting deviants in our society because it is societal, cultural and traditional specific. Anytime Western donors realise that, one way of discipline a child is by beating them, they feel a bit weird.”
“There are people that abuse by inflicting injuries on kids. However, there are also a lot of people who have been straightened up by hard-handled teachers.
“So can we as a people, look at our cultural realities and settings and develop a way of correcting deviant behaviour so that it is effective because the end results from the Western world is nothing admirable”, Angel Carbonu noted.
GES urges parents to deal with any teacher who beats their child
If a youngster shows up at home after being sent to school with evidence that a teacher has been fired, the parent is free to take drastic action.
The Ghana Education Service’s (GES) Director of Guidance and Counseling, Ivy Kumi, who issued this directive, has made it clear that she views canning students without using the GES’s approved alternative sanction as an act of assault, and that parents should do everything in their power to confront the offending educator.
Since caning and other types of physical punishment constitute abusive, parents can resort to them, Madam Kumi remarked.
A teacher has committed abuse if a student has been physically injured as a result of being struck. An assault has occurred on school grounds, and the victim’s parents may choose to file a police complaint.
