Leah questions ethnocentric thinking

In my second week in Thandokhulu, I saw students being punished. They were kneeling in the hallway and a teacher was pacing with a red stick. I began noticing that all of the teachers had the same red sticks. The teachers were not beating the students; they were just giving a little tap here, a pinch there. Even when I went to book club at Sophumelela, in Phillipi, the teachers had the same sticks. At first, I was taken aback. I was upset because this was not the form of punishment that I considered humane or acceptable. However, my time in South Africa has taught me that such a judgment was ethnocentric, imperialistic, and close minded.

           

Imagine this: You are a teacher. The US government suddenly passes a bill that mandates teachers to only use corporal punishment. It is now against the law to punish students verbally or with detentions. Teachers are given no training or resources with which to apply these new methods. Would you hit your students?

           

I know that I would not. I do not think that hitting my students would help them learn. They were brought up in a society that does not, by and large, use corporal punishment. Even within households, it is more and more uncommon for parents to corporally punish their children. Because my students would not have grown up with this kind of discipline, they would not respond positively to it.

           

Now, remove your ethnocentrism. Pretend for a minute that the American culture is not always the right culture, the advanced culture. Now reexamine the scenario in the South African context. Growing up, South Africans, parents and teachers alike, use corporal punishment to discipline children and students. Now, the “New” South African government decides to outlaw corporal punishment in the 1996 constitution. The teachers were provided with no training in alternative forms of discipline and were given no resources with which they may apply such disciplinary tactics. How could they be expected to follow such a regulation? And if they did, would the students respond? They have not been taught to fear a detention or verbal warning.

           

If the South African government wants its school systems to change their disciplinary tactics, it must begin by changing the culture from which the students and teachers come. This is largely impossible – and not really even my point.

           

My point is simply that imposing ideas of what is “right” and “wrong” on other cultures is imperialistic. Judging another community based on foreign standards is ridiculous. Even though it is so easy for everyone to criticize the American government for its ludicrous exportation of “democracy,” it is difficult for those same critics to see their own hypocrisy in trying to export values.