The notion that beating children is somehow good for them has a long history. The origin of the phrase ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ that we use today lies in Hudibras – a satirical poem by Samuel Butler published in 1662. But there are even older though more obscure versions. It was the death of a child at the hands of her teacher that triggered this week’s musings and prompted a trip down the memory lane.

April 1995, Chalt, a village to the north of Gilgit and the Naunehal Public School. Standing there on my first morning as principal and listening to the children sing the national anthem there was a sense of both pride and pleasure. I had given up a highly-paid post in local government in the UK to spend two years (now fifteen) as a volunteer in Pakistan. It felt good and right. I had lived a relatively privileged life, wanted for nothing and was comfortable. Like many who worked in the social sector I wanted to ‘give something back’ and this had to be my way of doing it. The national anthem finished, I made my first morning address to the students and they filed off to their classes. The teachers were waiting for me in the office and then I stopped in my tracks, horrified, confused and uncertain as to what to do next.

A small child was being beaten with a thick stick on the edge of the playground. He was crying out in pain as the blows hit him. The man doing the beating was the school PTI who I had been introduced to the day before, a smiling man I took an instant liking to, and here he was thrashing a child. Cutting a long and painful story short I had taken over a school where classroom violence was part of the daily routine. Children were beaten by teachers, male and female, for the slightest infraction of a myriad of rules. One child I particularly remember became deaf in his left ear as a result of being beaten severely. The children expected to be beaten and the teachers expected to beat the children. Welcome to Pakistan.

Challenging a culture like that in a little school in the mountains was difficult enough; challenging it across an entire education system is difficulty multiplied by several orders of magnitude. It took me years to understand that the culture of violence which I saw in education permeated all walks of life – that this is a country and a culture where violence runs in the blood of many of its inhabitants (no…not all) and that life was a commodity differently valued from where I had my origins.

Corporal punishment in schools in my own youth was fast dying out, and by the time I left school, it had been abolished altogether. It is now almost half a century since it was lawful to beat a child in school in the UK and there are countless those who regret its passing. I do not. Sparing the rod does not spoil the child and there are other ways of punishing that do not have to involve physical violence. We wonder at where the roots of the terrorism that lies in our culture here today come from. One of them may just be in the classroom. Being on the receiving end of terror in the form of a beating by one’s teacher is a powerful determinant when it comes to what is acceptable by way of the terror that the individual thus acculturated, may inflict on others. Lessons hard learned are rarely forgotten.

The writer is a British social worker settled in Pakistan. Email: manticore73@gmail .com