Striking Back

There threatens to be a war over our children. The question is: To strike or not to strike?

At 4:00 in the afternoon one day last October, Cheng Tai-fen, still at the office, received a telephone call from her son's guidance counselor, asking her to stop off at the school for a meeting. Arriving at the school, she saw that her small son's face was covered with red marks. She discovered that during a morning class, her son had been struck hard by the teacher after he dared to talk back.

What happened was, the classroom was very noisy, and some students could not hear clearly what the teacher said. Cheng's son asked the teacher to repeat it. The teacher said: "How can you be so stupid? I've said it already and you still don't understand!" Her son retorted: "It's just because I'm so stupid that I have to ask!" The teacher then called her son out into the hallway and struck him hard across the face. The blow broke the skin, raised a red bruise on the cheek, and bent the child's glasses out of shape.

Terror in the classroom

After the child returned home, his father, Peng Huai-en, a professor of law, was upset and angry. That evening he took his son to a local clinic to have his face examined, and took photos as evidence. The next day Peng faxed the results of the check-up to the school, and asked a lawyer to send a letter to the teacher involved saying that the family would prefer criminal charges against him.

As Peng, himself an educator, says: "I was beaten as a child, and I know perfectly well that beating is not an appropriate method for disciplining children." Although he is now a university professor, he wasn't particularly good at schoolwork as a kid. He often scored low on tests, and even today he can vividly recall the fear he felt from the constant threat of being thrashed for poor grades.

"In those days when someone was to receive corporal punishment, the principal himself supervised the beating," Peng recalls. The private middle school he attended has since claimed Peng as one of their "outstanding alumni," and several times asked him to come back to the school to speak. But he has always refused.

Last year, when his son was to begin 7th grade, the Pengs had no idea that the middle school in their district was famous for the "severity" of its education. After school began, they discovered that there was an enormous gap between their ideas of how to teach children and those of the teacher.

Once the school did a survey of parents on the subject of disciplining the children. Peng responded in no uncertain terms that he did not approve of any form of corporal punishment. Later, he found out that teachers were still striking the palms of kids' hands using the "loving little hand" (a small disciplinary stick). Peng wanted to relay his objections to this to the teacher by making a note in his son's teacher-parent communication notebook. Peng happened to notice in the notebook's margin that the school's moral lesson for that week was "obey the law." So he wrote simply, "Please obey the law." This was a reference to the fact that the Ministry of Education has clearly stated that it does not sanction corporal punishment. Peng hoped that the teacher would get the message.

Peng suggests that many teachers have an inadequate understanding of the law, and do not realize that a teacher who strikes a child is guilty of assault. Yet not only many teachers, but even many parents, could not understand what the Pengs were trying to achieve. They felt that the school had already punished the teacher administratively, so why should there be a criminal suit?

The last resort

Peng's spouse Cheng Tai-fen says that if they had allowed themselves to be dissuaded from seeking legal redress by others' doubts, this would have added insult to injury for their child, who would have felt that his parents talked a lot about upholding the law, but had not stood up for him when the going got rough. But there would also have been tremendous pressure on the child if the lawsuit went ahead. Once when Cheng dropped her child off at school, she saw several teachers and students putting up a banner at the school gate with their signatures on it expressing support for the teacher in the case.

"In fact," says Cheng, "we got the most pressure from other parents." Parents of classmates of her son called to ask them things like, "Why don't you just transfer your son to another school or send him abroad?" or "Are you going to object if the teacher strikes other students in the class?" She was simply dumbfounded by such questions.

On the other hand, it was gratifying that some parents whom they didn't even know called to express support. One parent from Kaohsiung, whose child suffered a serious eye injury after being struck with a metal ruler, told them that the teacher had thus far refused to admit any error, and the school would not replace the teacher. Peng feels that in such cases simply moving the teacher to another class would not resolve the problem. Moreover, this was a very clear case of assault, so the best thing would be an appeal to the law.

It is indeed tragic when problems between teachers and students may, in the end, be resolvable only by resorting to the judiciary. In the case of the Pengs, as it turned out, they did not take the teacher to court. They reached a compromise whereby the teacher paid their legal costs and donated NT$50,000 to the Humanistic Education Foundation.

Cheng says that what's past is past, and she only hopes that she and her husband's actions can serve as a reminder in schoolyards across Taiwan that teachers and students must respect one another, and that teachers and parents both have things to learn.

The problem is, there remains some distance between this hope and reality. One day the Peng child said to his mother: "That day I had to bow down in front of the teacher three times and say how sorry I was. But even now, the teacher has never said he was sorry to me." Adults demand that children admit their errors. But what about the adults?