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Pupils must be disciplined

THERE is a devil in section 10. The older generation remembers section 10 very well in apartheid legislation.

THERE is a devil in section 10. The older generation remembers section 10 very well in apartheid legislation.

Very few today are aware that the very section 10, this time of a constitutional and democratic government, in the South African Schools Act 84 of 1996, is the seed of the immorality and disrespect that schoolchildren display to their teachers and some parents.

A teacher is a parent of a child. A child spends the better part of every day with the teacher, not the natural parent. It is illogical and irrational to have the natural parent retain the right to chastise the child, but deny the parent who spends more time with the child, the right to discipline them.

Teachers must have the right to discipline and, if needs be, to administer corporal punishment.

Section 10, which prohibits corporal punishment and provides that no person may administer corporal punishment to a learner, was a mistake and must be expunged from our law.

There are problems inherent in the child, like hearing, sight and mental problems, which must be diagnosed and dealt with properly and for which a child should not be punished physically at all.

There are also systematic problems like the failure of the education system to pick up that the child is an orphan whose granny does not have any knowledge about foster care grants and as a result the child is always hungry, which affects the child for which no punishment should be meted out.

There are behavioural problems that needs scientific intervention for which no punishment is a remedy. But there are behavioural problems that are simply informed by attitudes for which the only deterrent may be the knowledge of adverse consequences, which includes corporal punishment.

Section 10 is producing immoral and disrespectful children with no ethics.

Daniel Thulare, Benoni

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