Physical pain, or the fear of it, does not help a child learn better. Corporal punishment in schools is often a perversion disguised as pedagogy. The Calcutta high court has been trying to stop the practice in all schools in West Bengal through the agency of the state government, which has now submitted to the court a circular banning all such forms of punishment. This is unexceptionable. But implementing the ban, even if the penalty is made severe, will be difficult for the government. Children are beaten or terrorized in every kind of school in rural and urban India. Belief in the salutary value of corporal punishment cuts across the social classes. This has less to do with theories of education than with the feudal values that still inform relationships between adults and minors in Indian society. At the heart of corporal punishment is an abuse of power, an exploitation of inequality (often of more than one kind) legitimized as traditional wisdom. The court is concerned about schools. But everyday life in India furnishes enough instances, ubiquitously, of the fact that what teachers sometimes do to children in schools is done in numerous other contexts as well. Children working in homes, tea-stalls or roadside eating-places, child labourers in the unorganized sector, homeless children in the streets are all vulnerable to physically abusive treatment from variously empowered adults. And in most cases, the adult’s action will not be perceived as abusive by those around him.

Children themselves are often unaware of the wrong being done to them when they are beaten or bullied. They are usually taught a certain attitude to authority at home and at school, which tries to enforce uncritical acceptance, and this persists in their adult lives in many forms. Unquestioning and unprotesting compliance is held up as a virtue that must be maintained through a regime of fear. Learning to identify physical abuse, speaking up against it, and reporting it at home should be an essential part of a child’s upbringing. Teachers must also be aware of the pitfalls of the power that they are invested with. The sources of adult cruelty are inscrutable, but it is especially fostered by particular forms of authority and hierarchy. It will be difficult for the state to stop corporal punishment unless adults and children alike are taught to think critically, and fearlessly, about the society that, left to itself, would demand their unthinking conformity.