Corporal punishment, or “giving the stick,” is very common in Tanzanian schools. Indeed, it is how nearly all teachers punish students and maintain control of their classrooms. Nearly all teachers derive a sense of authority from the stick, and when they are “on duty” teachers carry a stick around as a kind a baton, waving it at students and shouting things like, “wewe, njoo!” (you, come!). It may come as a surprise to many Americans that this is how Tanzanian schools operate, but without many of the administrative additions of American schools, Tanzanian teachers are not only administrators, but also (as I have been told by other staff members), police, councilors, advisors, second parents, and, of course, teachers. While some teachers have permanent administrative positions in addition to their teaching duties (like discipline master, second master, academic master, and so on), every week two teachers are assigned the position of “teacher on duty.” These teachers are responsible for the day to day operations of school, and this last week was my first time “on duty.”
The teachers on duty, as you might expect, have a multitude of responsibilities, many of which (even after following my first experience) are still unknown to me. The foremost responsibility is that of disciplinarian. Is a student not cleaning the environment with enough dedication? Hit them. Is a student late to school? Hit them (or make them carry water from the well, which according to different estimates is somewhere between 3 and 8 kilometers away from the school). Is a student not moving to their classroom fast enough? Hit them (or at least, threaten to hit them). Are the students being too loud in their classrooms? Hit them. As you can see, the response is pretty uniform, though some teachers use hitting in addition to other strategies, like special cleaning duties, kneeling, or chalk in the hair.
At this point, you may be wondering why students seem to have a responsibility to clean the environment, but the answer is quite clear if you give it a bit of thought: there are no janitors in Tanzanian schools. Every morning for 30 minutes before classes start students “clean the environment.” Largely this consists of picking of leaves that have fallen on the ground, but there is a rotating schedule for mopping the staff rooms, and doing things like cleaning the latrines. These things, by the way, happen every day. An interesting feature of Tanzanian schools is that there are no waste bins, so if anyone has trash it is simply thrown on the ground, with the expectation that it will be picked up the next morning. There are pen caps, bottle caps, old pens, and bits of trash all over the grounds. Oddly, less priority is placed on the pickup of these items than the fallen leaves, which garner most of the attention. During morning cleanliness, the teacher on duty walks around ensuring that the students are picking up “rubbish,” using the strategies I mentioned above for ensuring compliance. However, it is simply impossible for students to spend 30 minutes cleaning the environment, so the students do most of their cleaning when a stick is pointed in their direction. As teacher on duty I prioritized trash on the ground, but as the students began to realize that I was not going to beat them, their energy level for cleaning decreased even further below the moderately false enthusiasm they demonstrate when sticks are pointed their way.
The teacher on duty has a number of other responsibilities that I may get into in another post, but I want to focus here on corporal punishment, so I will return to the classroom. This same week I began to have my first serious discipline problems in class. In my first two classes of the week, my Form II students, who I had only taught for a week previously, would not quiet down. They had been introduced to my rules, which basically consist of variations of “Respect,” which is an important element of Tanzanian culture. 1) The students need to respect Mr. Alex by being silent when he is talking, and 2) The students need to respect each other by being silent when their classmates are talking. It is pretty simple, but in these two classes they simply would not be quiet. We were trying to do a reading exercise, and I could hardly hear the students reading because of all the side conversations that were taking place. Needless to say, I was very frustrated. At the beginning of the next class I began a very serious conversation with them, beginning with “Why do students talk in class?” on the blackboard. I asked for their opinions, and then asked what I should do. I told them I had too much respect for them as people to use the stick like their other teachers do. Nevertheless, a number of my students suggested taking that course of acton.
Corporal punishment is so ingrained in Tanzanian schools that I think it is difficult for students to imagine discipline operating in any other way. I told them that I didn’t want to have to punish them, but if their behavior continued they would be forced to sit in a chair facing the rest of the class, which is something they do not like. If their behavior continued to be a problem, I was going to make them go outside and roll in the dirt near our classroom. When other teachers and parents asked why they were dirty, I told them, they would have to say “I was disrespectful in Mr. Alex’s class.” They laughed at this. I hope I do not have to inflict this punishment, because it would probably mean that they would get beat by other teachers for being dirty, and their parents would have the problem of dealing with their children’s one set of school clothes being dirty, but I wanted a serious disciplinary method that was not the stick, or referring students to a higher authority (which also would have meant the stick). My students were great for the rest of the week, but we will see how things progress.
All week I had an internal dialogue going about whether I could ever use the stick on a student. If you had asked me before coming to Tanzania whether I would ever consider it, I would have said no, but now I am not so sure. It is such a big part of the Tanzanian school culture, that not using it draws looks of incredulity from other teachers. But, faced between referring a student to the discipline master for a serious disciplinary matter in the confines of my class, and disciplining the student myself, I think I would use the stick on a student. This is not to say that the stick is a useful or worthwhile source of discipline, but in a culture that is reliant on it there is a certain source of power associated with its use, especially as a last resort. To my mind it is overused, and I don’t think its use has any real effect on influencing the long-term behavior of some students, but as a final option, it is hard to dispute its power-effects on students.