An Egyptian teacher has been jailed for beating an 11 year old student to death, for not doing his homework. Math teacher Haitham Nabeel Abdelhamid, 23, took Islam Amr Badr outside the classroom and hit him violently in the stomach. The boy fainted and later died in hospital of heart failure in the city of Alexandria.
The court was told the boy had four broken ribs. The teacher said he only meant to discipline the pupil and did not mean to hurt anyone. The teacher’s lawyer was quoted as saying in court: “Hitting [a child] is not banned in schools and my client did not break the law.” In the state education system, young, inexperienced and under-resourced teachers often struggle to control classes of 60 to 100 children.
********
When parents talk about punishing students with any form of physical violence, they often don’t realize the consequences. This is just one extreme example of what can go wrong if teachers can’t control classes without needing to hit them.
Many parents might also hit their children at home and so they see no problem with teachers smacking or hitting children as they think it creates discipline. Unfortunately, they don’t realize what can occur as a result. Although this case revolves around the death of the child, there are probably many more cases where the student became permanently traumatized, and because no death occurred, the event did not get covered by the media. So, parents don’t know how frequently such beatings might occur.
Trained teachers can teach without hitting students. Poorer countries need to start investing serious amounts of money in education if they want the next generation to build a prosperous nation.
Regards,
Gene Netto
Read the full article here:
Boy-killing Egypt teacher jailed
Egypt teacher tried over beating
Story from BBC NEWS:
