You and I had it good, dears. Ours was probably the last generation in our country to actually have and enjoy a childhood. If you’re reading this on a Sunday, as you browse through your favourite rag, you’re probably between forty and fifty-five; or if you’re reading this on the Superhighway of Information, as your [...]

The Sundaytimes Sri Lanka

Childhood ends in dire corporal punishment

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You and I had it good, dears. Ours was probably the last generation in our country to actually have and enjoy a childhood. If you’re reading this on a Sunday, as you browse through your favourite rag, you’re probably between forty and fifty-five; or if you’re reading this on the Superhighway of Information, as your browser allows, you’re possibly a twenty-something or a tech-savvy young ‘thirty-teen’. Either way, you’re in the mental, intellectual, or emotional tax bracket that is familiar with horaa polis, batta, and tin kaedeema.

Your early heroes were Biggles or Blyton’s boundlessly good girl characters; cricket was still a gentleman’s game; and there were six hours (well, four… but it felt like eight, didn’t it?) of perfect afternoon sunlight between school and sundown, duty and dinner, telephoning friends and television that would not make Miley Cyrus blush.

What I remember most is that we had a life. And it was not filled tighter than a 138 at rush hour. We could learn lessons in the classroom as well as the playing field; love books as well as buddies; hang out with cousins and friends and neighbours; and not come home until nine o’clock or later without our parents worrying that we would be kidnapped, or miss tuition class, or end up as sorry social and cultural rejects on the scrap heap of our glorious nation (which is to say, the polite society of uncles, aunts, and our parent’s very important friends whom it was very important to impress). What happened to that polite but happy society?

Today, I learned that a child who had failed the Grade Five Scholarship Exam (aka GFSE) had been chased away from home because he was a disgrace to his family. Tomorrow, I may hear again with utter horror and tragic fascination that a father burned his offspring’s face for the same crime of failing the GFSE. Where have all our joyful yesterdays gone, all of a sudden?
My memory doesn’t fail me often, so it is no trick of remembering that boyhood was quite idyllic in the – well, never mind… you know what – and when – I mean: the good old, bad old, days: when we were not good, not old, and not up to our innocent mischief in the day!

The worst that could happen to us was that a cop (not an esteemed member of the constabulary, dears, a college prefect) would cop us and we would be frog-marched to the cop-shed and told – as if the fate of western civilisation depended on it – not to return without the exact dimensions of the college quadrangle, as measured with a half-foot-ruler. That, or one’s headmaster would fix his good gimlet eye on one and stare firmly in one’s direction until one trembled like a jelly caught during a bad day in the vicinity of Pompeii or Vesuvius; and one would be reduced to a sorry, quivering mass in one’s headmaster’s venerable office or the venerated college hall during assembly to single out the bad eggs…

Of course, the glow of the golden age that is youth, which is passed, can cast a patina over the mind’s eye as it glances back. There were rascals and rapscallions who were caned for being so fatuous as to light crackers in the school yard. Utter rotters were expelled from school, and certain parents were not averse to giving their sons six of the best with a weeping willow for egregious offences like smashing up the family saloon on a secret midnight escapade gone badly wrong. But, I dare say, the punishment fit the crime. Sterling virtues were rewarded by just guardians and sorry vices were dealt with swiftly but fairly. A glory has passed from the earth in that regard!

Now some editorialists will tell us that education under this regime is in a shambles, or that the school system has been on the slow descent to some poorly regulated limbo since the open economy and the advent of tuition factories and private universities run by savvy marketers and racketeers, or corrupt cronies of the powers that be. But the fact remains that parents and teachers punishing their wards or charges in heinous ways and by hideous means exposes a much darker underbelly to our national psyche. And the rot starts at the top, we reckon, in a milieu where miscreants who fail to achieve the ambitions of their elders and betters are met with short shrift.

Please, or be passed over for promotion! Pander to, or be summarily dismissed or transferred to outer darkness! Prostrate oneself before the powers that be, or be hauled up in court or fetched up in the prison, or worse, the closest canal! Punishment is no longer commensurate with the crime committed. Parents, like elected representatives or powerful regencies, often take the law into their own hands to chide or chastise real or perceived transgressors. Perhaps appealing to the police or the president if need be can be a first step to righting the culture of impunity prevailing over corporal punishment in schools in particular and also society in general. 

Pains me to say it, but that will neither stop nor reverse the present rot: because all our blessed childhoods can only begin to shine again when we all recognise and act upon the principles of culpae poena par esto: “let the punishment fit the crime”.

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