Have We Given Too Much Power To Pupils At The Expense of Teachers?

There is a sad story of a hardworking teacher, in a little known school in Kenya, who after being physically roughed up by a male student, ended up suffering a stroke and retiring from teaching prematurely.The tragedy of this story is that the Head-teacher took the side of the villain.

This and many others, some of which are never reported, not only depict the diminishing roles of teachers as custodians of discipline in schools, but the grim face of the so-called children's rights. Indeed, the need to modify the modern image of the teacher as an agent of change rather than an enforcer, could not have come at an appropriate time.

The traditional image of a stern faced School-Master carrying a rod, is inconsistent with research findings on the conducive teaching and learning atmosphere.

But, the pendulum appears to have swung far too much towards the pupil's rights, to the extent that even indisciplined and lawless children are having a field day in causing unnecessary disruptions to learning. There is also the likelihood of parents with poor past experiences with teachers, getting the opportunity to hit back at any teacher of their child.

Because they never saw anything positive in a teacher during their school days, in their minds all teachers are up to no good.These kind of parents, will always insist that their child is right even when they are not.

Because litigation against teachers continue to hit newspaper headlines,belligerent parents and their children are emboldened to put outrageous demands on schools and teachers.In one incident, a parent whose child had learning difficulties, wanted to know why her son could not write coherently even when she paid the school a lot of money for tuition.

Lobbyists for children's' rights(including UNESCO) and negative highlights of the plights of children in certain parts of world, have only created a monster out of the justifiable need for reasonable use of the 'rod' to discipline children. Indeed, when the matter of whether to ban 'spanking' or not, was recently brought to the British parliament, legislators were reluctant to enforce outright banning.

Recent calls to give Head-teachers more powers to send disruptive pupils away from school is indicative of the society's message that too much power in the hands of minors, can only harm the minors themselves, and the future generation