Last week, ripples were felt across the country following the heinous murder of a 16-year-old girl at a school in Bandar Utama. The victim was stabbed approximately 200 times by a 14-year-old fellow male schoolmate. When I first glanced over the headlines, I assumed by default that the news was coming out of America.
Then I read through the fine print- Surely not, it can't be! But yes, it has! Knife crime has made its way through the gates of Malaysian schools- long renowned to be relics of safety for our children.
Understandably, the incident has been met by widespread public outrage. The principal of the school in question tendered a hearty but teary apology- but what more could she have done? We cannot expect her to shoulder the blame as there were larger forces at play. Amidst the chaos, many have weighed in on measures to stymie the issue at hand.
The Selangor State Government has already committed to the most obvious and effective manoeuvre; by supporting the introduction of metal detectors and increased CCTV coverage in schools across the state. This may appear to dehumanise our schools, which were built for decades upon resolute foundations of trust between teachers and students. However, it is necessary considering the gravity of the situation at hand.
One of the clarion calls is for the now outlawed "rotan"(cane) to be reintroduced as punishment in schools. This was the call made by former Democratic Action Party(DAP) supremo Lim Guan Eng.
Having come through the ranks of the Malaysian schooling system myself just a decade ago, my glutes are no stranger to the embrace of the cane(rotan). I, like almost every male Malaysian student attending school in the early 2010's, was subject to getting caned at some point in our schooling life. I singled out males because teachers and discipline masters were much more lenient when meting out punishment to females- which did not traditionally involve caning.
If you were a boy, you'd get caned for anything and everything. My school was an all-boys institution established by conservative Irish Christian missionaries of a now bygone era, setting it up as an ostentatious grandstand of "rotan/caning culture". I would get caned for the most trivial reasons- which usually involved forgetting to do homework or even forgetting to bring a book to class. I once got caned for purchasing a can of soy milk outwith recess/break time. I thought to myself at the time: “Surely, this has to be a flagrant violation by the books of the United Nations Human Rights Council”
I watched people around me get caned for piddling reasons; because their hair was too long or because they had a logo on their pants that wasn't approved by the school administration. If you're wondering how getting caned feels, it's like getting bitten by red ants- just that it's like a whole swarm of them landed simultaneously on your bottom.
As I rose through the student ranks as a prefect and later as Assistant Head Prefect of my school, I became more adept at evading the 'red ant' ultimatum. Just a few years later, Malaysia unanimously outlawed caning in schools. Now, Lim Guan Eng says it should be reinstated in the wake of what happened in the Bandar Utama incident.
I must say I totally disagree with him, as also echoed by Shah Alam MP Azli Yusof and Bayan Baru MP Sim Tze Tzin. Not because caning is a barbaric form of punishment; and not because it is often misused by undiscerning teachers. Rather, it is because it is an ineffective punishment/education tool. I watched many fellow students around me who were "chronic receivers of the cane(rotan)" become totally immune to the pain. They were not flustered by it whatsoever and could even crack jokes a minute after. The pain no longer bothered them, and therefore there was no incentive for them not to re-engage in the mischief that resulted in them getting caned in the first place. Therefore, I believe that while caning could act as a deterrent at first, it perpetuates students who are repeat offenders via a vicious cycle to simply offend again.
I would argue that measures such as detention like in countries such as the US or punishments of school/community service are far more effective in acting as deterrents to various offences amongst students.
There is another popular train of thought, however, being thrown into the mix that I whole heartedly concur with: the reintroduction of standardised national level primary school leaving assessments(formerly the UPSR) and the mid secondary assessment (formerly the PMR, later PT3) . I was part of the last batch that sat the PMR before the Malaysian government at the time did away with it, in line with its paradigm shift away from academics, shifting its focus instead towards sports/extra-curricular activities. The whole approach was a Finland-esque system targeted at nurturing holistic students; although I would argue that the whole idea has gone down like a lead balloon.
It almost feels criminal how current students have been so deincentivised to study/perform at school, given that the only standardised national exam they ever sit for is at the tail end of their schooling careers (SPM, the equivalent of the IGCSE). Scholarships which used to as abundant as the Garden of Eden have now dwindled and our students now face a drought of scholarship options post-graduation despite stellar performances. It is said that an idle mind is the devil's workshop. So instead of harping on the reintroduction of corporal punishment, perhaps, we should address the fountainhead of the issue and provide more incentive for our students to perform well in school by ramping up scholarships and reintroducing key national exams that have historically been pivots of healthy peer-to-peer competition.
I fondly remember my time at school 10 years ago. It was a time of playful mischief and banter, but it was also a place without room for anything sinister. School was a place of punishment at times, but it was also a place of solace and comfort.
Is the horrifying incident at Bandar Utama a harbinger of more to come? We are not proprietors of a crystal ball, so we can never know. But let it not water down our resolve to foster a safe, inclusive and nurturing environment for our kids at school. For it is the least that they deserve!
Thillak Sekaran (thillaksekaran@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
