Vice-Chancellor of Bolgatanga Technical University Prof. Samuel Erasmus Alnaa wants the decision to ban caning of students as a disciplinary measure in schools be reversed.
Prof. Alnaa fears teachers could lose control over students and their authority to enforce discipline in schools if the ban is not lifted.
“Minimum amount of the cane should be applied. If not, the kind of society we are going now, I fear for all of us,” he stated.
While acknowledging that the ban was prompted by the excessive caning of students by some teachers, the academic argued that such a disciplinary measure is necessary in moulding youngsters to be socially fit.
He cited increasing incidents of criminal acts including heinous crimes like murder by schoolchildren in some advanced countries, warning that “one day, these children will just overrun the schools because of the indiscipline” if the measure is not brought back.
“If you go to most of the serious democratic countries, if you go to the US, you see what is happening – where students carry guns to schools and start firing on their college students.”
He continued “I think it is very negative in terms of how we prohibit some of these things. So, a time will come, they will say, you the parent, you are not allowed to cane your child. It is happening in some of the developed countries, you are not supposed to cane your child”.
In 2017, the Ghana Education Service (GES) banned caning of students as a measure of instilling corrective behavior in students in both public and private schools in Ghana.
The GES, subsequently, replaced it with the Positive Discipline Toolkit together with other prescribed sanctions it said were contained in the Head Teachers’ Handbook as measures of correcting students in schools.
The new measures are line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was ratified in Ghana in 1990 but couldn’t be implemented for decades.
But speaking in an interview on State of Our Nation on Dreamz FM, Prof. Alnaa argued that such measures do not portend well in the African society.
He believes that jettisoning corrective measures that conform with African cultural norms for alien ones could lead to widespread indiscipline and plunge Africa into an abyss of moral decadence.
