Indiscipline has worsened since the Ministry of Education banned caning in school, many teachers easily claim when asked about the low performance in national examinations that has seen some headteachers barred from their work stations by irate parents.
Two, parents keep threatening the tutors with reporting them to the authorities should the “unruly” learners be punished or asked to bring parents or guardians to school.
Among other reasons for the resistance by parents or guardians, corporal punishment is banned while others give it the customer service reasoning. That teacher ought to be friendly to sell knowledge to his customer, namely the learner.
Why is discipline a big deal in school management? In his book, School Mastery, Geoffrey Griffin, the founder of Starehe Boys Centre in Nairobi, says discipline should inject in each pupil the habits, self-respect, and proper pride to achieve good conduct without supervision in school and in adult life.
Griffin says in the book that “discipline is not something to be discarded like a garment on leaving the school premises”.
Unfortunately, many students think discipline is a school item that they will drop like a hot potato once they sit for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination or its secondary school sister, the KCSE.
After the national examinations, in Kenya or elsewhere in the world, the candidates are wont to start the so-called academic bonfires when they set alight books and other school-related paraphernalia while breaking into shrieks and guffaw. It is finished, they loudly announce.
They have broken the chains of school confinement, they say without knowing that if they depended on the teachers’ word or the cane to be ‘disciplined’, the adult life could be more confining and scary.
Indeed, at Starehe — the once academic giant that is now fighting for fresh strength to shine — students were moulded to walk through mud without getting muddy.
To go through life without being tainted by the engulfing corruption but focusing on the big picture or aiming higher (its school motto is ‘Na Tulenge Juu’, Kiswahili for aiming higher).
Teachers, almost to a man, crave caning the learners or using force to discipline them. But when caning became corporal punishment, the ban was effected.
However, behind the back of the government or “secretly”, teachers are still using the cane. In other places, using the cane is the preserve of the headteacher or the principal and perhaps their deputy.
Other teachers have thrown in the towel and are watching gleefully as students rot away, not knowing how to effectively punish or discipline them.
According to teachers, outlawing the rod has allowed students to be disrespectful, to be lazy, to report to school late, to engage in premarital sex, to confront and defy teachers, and to take studies casually, leading to poor results in examinations.
However, there is no proof that using the cane will deliver the power to moderate some of these ills in learners.
It is possible that a learner can be as meek as possible in school, but turn wild at home, during the holidays, or at the weekend if they are day students.
Using the cane has forced students to transfer to other schools or drop in academics or co-curriculum activity or drop out of school due to the unfriendliness of teachers who don’t appreciate effort, but insist on “instilling” discipline using pain.
If respect is earned, discipline should also be imparted to the young students without chaos, hostility, or humiliation.
“A major fault is over-reliance on corporal punishment and suspension,” says Griffin in School Mastery. He says mild forms of punishment will do the trick: doing press-ups, being asked to clean the compound, or going round the athletics track….
He says serious offences do not require the cane, but counselling, which is one of the most delicate exercises in turning the learner into a responsible member of the community.
Indeed, a few years ago, the government of Kenya said it would deploy professional counsellors to schools in reaction to cases or arson that left a trail of destruction and disruption to normal learning. It is, however, not known how many have been employed in the schools.
Although caning is outlawed, the murmurs about reintroducing it is a loud warning. The education fraternity ought to confront the issue in the quest to embrace modern ways of reining in runaway indiscipline whose effects cloud individual progress and hurt economic growth.
