Sanitising a Traumatic School Experience – Yay or Nay?
It is true, we all live on nostalgia, and
it has kept us going through this pandemic. From getting in touch with old
school friends to listening to the music we grew up with, we have all taken
advantage of our memories to deal with the difficulties of every day.
There are two sides to every coin, and this one has a dark side. As much as I have enjoyed interacting and working with my former school mates during our Covid volunteering efforts, I have also been triggered by the many forwarded messages about going to school in India in the 1990s on WhatsApp. These have played on our nostalgia and have also made us rethink our experiences. Some of them made me go from “aww” to “eww, that’s not how it felt back then”. The common thread between them is that they have all retraumatised me.
The below image (one of many such forwards) was sent to me by my mother who was a teacher in my school when I was a student. She even taught me Hindi for three continuous years! My response to her was that only a teacher who gave out these corporeal punishments would spin them in a positive light and my mother did not like it. (Obviously!)
All these punishments were a daily part of my school life. I was either standing at the door, on the bench, kneeling down on the hard stone floor or tar playground in the sun or being pinched by teachers on the cheeks, arms and ears. One of them even regularly punched me on the head when calling me an idiot and another bruised my legs nearly every day using a ruler or a stick she may have taken down from the tree. Other punishments included being hit on the palm or knuckles with a wood or mental ruler, kneeling with hands-up in the air, standing/kneeling in the sun (I remember collapsing one time) and more. So you see why I mostly have negative memories of my school going experience than positive or empowering ones.
The indignity and negativity is in the past but like all traumatic experiences, it raises its ugly head every now and then. Today as an adult I find it hard to see these punishments for something they are not – positive life lessons. They are plainly physically, and mentally traumatic punishments that demotivated me and put a terrible fear of learning in my heart and mind.
It is likely that such practices are no longer followed in most schools in India, but the fact remains that along with nostalgia comes trauma and after that a response to that trauma. What is your response to your school trauma? Mine is to shed light, to desanitise experiences and present them raw. I like to delve deep into how these experiences have framed us today, especially those that have made us more sympathetic or empathetic. Mine made me rebellious for sometime and that turned into curiosity and empathy (aided by other more traumatic experiences). They also helped me clearly see that there are better ways to teach and learn – positive ways of learning and this is what makes me a proud member of the learning and development community.
The questions to ask are:
- In this day and age where there is so much awareness on mental health, why do we portray corporeal punishment in positive light? Should we even be doing this for the sake of pretend nostalgia?
- Why do we feel the need to relay traumatic experiences in a sanitised way to the generation Z and the young children of today? (They are more woke than us and not being honest with them is not protecting them.)
If you have any insight or answers to these
questions, please feel free to comment below and start a very important
conversation.
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