Chitral Today Report
BREP: People here have demanded strict action against a teacher for beating and injuring a student in the Government High School Brep a few days back. They said though the government has strictly banned and devised punishment for those found involved in corporal punishment in schools, the district education department seemed not serious in taking action against the teacher even after the passage of about three weeks.
Javed Iqbal, a student of class 7th, was beaten black and blue by theology teacher (TT) Najmuddin Najmi after the student failed to complete his assigned work. The student suffered fracture in the arm besides bleeding from the nose and the mouth, the parents and colleagues of the student said.
The residents said though a departmental inquiry had been ordered into the incident, they did not expect any action beyond transferring the teacher. They said teachers coming from other areas of the district to the village school had been involved in harassing students at the school in the past but action was never taken against them.
On complaints, the accused teachers were transferred to their native areas. Many of the non-local teachers do not want to stay here for long and always want to get themselves transferred. This means that transferring a teacher is not a penalty at all, a local said.
It may be mentioned that in the past many teachers posted in the high school from other areas had also been accused of stoking sectarianism among the students. In one such incident, two students from the school were ‘kidnapped’ by one of their teachers a few years back and taken to his home village near Chitral town to make them announce that they had become ‘Muslims.’ Ironically, no action was taken against the teacher for such a brazen crime.
Social circles say teachers are the builders of a nation and if they resort to such tactics and treat the young students in such a cruel way, how society as a whole could be reformed. The teachers should be trained on treating their students with utmost care by exhibiting professionalism, they added.