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What's left in the right to education
Everything in life is about 'drawing a line'. Knowing how far - and no further - to go. When I was in school, around Grade Nine, some of us students had to endure a terrifying bully.
- By Kevin Martin, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:20 February 13, 2008
Everything in life is about 'drawing a line'. Knowing how far - and no further - to go. When I was in school, around Grade Nine, some of us students had to endure a terrifying bully.
We lost our lunches to him, we lost games to him, we lost dignity sometimes via the odd unwarranted playground slap. It's all part of schooling, however, and one's broader education, to learn skills of survival, and find acceptance, in the jungle of peers.
That several of us so-called weaker ones were able to bring this bully to his knees, to find his Achilles' heel and work on it systematically, is another story altogether.
What we realised in those years was that this bullyboy got away with things for one sole reason: He had an overbearing dad who brought immense clout when he visited the principal's office.
Staff members were often intimidated by this man's presence outside the classroom, asking permission midway through a period to speak to his son.
A few teachers who tried being even-handed with discipline soon changed tack when it came to meting out detentions to the young bully.
"My dad said he's not sending me to school to be punished or detained but to learn useful information. My dad's made it clear with the principal that if there's any disciplining to be done, my dad's the only one that can do it," he told us, one time.
At that young stage in my life I sometimes envied my bully classmate, because I could still hear my grandpa (in whose care I was reared well into my late teens) tell my class teachers that he was leaving me entirely in their hands.
He used to say something like, "In my absence, you are his parents for the entire day. If he steps out of line, or needs any correction whatsoever (he tended to speak with a legalistic tone), I will be trusting you to do for me what I am unable to do because I'm not present."
The staff members, it would seem redundant to say, loved my granddad for this.
I proceeded to walk a very fine line those school years, knowing full well that a little overbalancing this way or that would bring repercussions.
I seriously cannot remember veering off course or being at the receiving end of heavy-handed punishments, except perhaps when five of us found a frog and put it in the bullyboy's desk one afternoon and he, like a mighty Goliath, took one look, turned pale and fainted.
We had to, as punishment, write out Wordsworth's poem Daffodils ten times. In retrospect that was a good thing, because the poem featured in the exam paper as well as in the memory test, so the five of us actually gained from the "frog" incident.
It was like punishment and reward mixed. In later years, when I took up teaching myself and got to be supervisor of the junior school, a lot of parents used to drop by for a chat - it being a boarding school in the hills - before leaving their wards in our care and heading off to their distant homes.
Over those years I truly lost count of how many parents echoed my granddad's sentiments - although not in those exact words.
Several would say, as though handing out a blank cheque, "Give him a beating if he misbehaves". I would always hasten to assure them that we did not dish out beatings but we had our own ways of ensuring that indiscipline was kept in check.
Today, however, it appears the bullyboy's dad has spawned clones ad infinitum. Parents are, once more, taking umbrage. Not everywhere, but more regularly.
Student rights, I hear, as if this is a new thing. I always believed a student had rights. But I also believed a teacher had more than just a right to teach Algebra. Education should be more encompassing than that, provided everyone knew where to "draw the line".
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
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