Even after its ban, corporal punishment is still being used in some schools and the new generation of teachers have to learn to enforce discipline in classrooms without the use of the stick.
In a matter of weeks, thousands of student teachers will be heading into South African classrooms for their teaching practice and will find themselves caught between two competing pressures related to classroom discipline: on the one hand, the well-established legal framework regarding their responsibilities towards children, and, on the other, the normalization of violence towards children in our society. These tensions often give rise to deep ethical dilemmas with which student teachers often grapple with long after returning to university or college. How to manage these dilemmas must be addressed in their training.
Corporal punishment, defined as any intentional act against a child that causes pain or physical discomfort, has been illegal in South African schools for over 30 years, with this ban maintained by a number of laws, guidelines and decisions. These include the South African Schools Act of 1996; National Education Policy Act of 1996; Corporal Punishment Abolition Act 1997; Decision of the Constitutional Court in Christian Education South Africa v. Minister of Education, 2000; The South African Council of Educators' Code of Ethics for Educators, 2024; and the recent Basic Education Law Amendment Act.
Despite this broad legal framework, student teachers routinely describe…