Three of us had been assigned a task. While the teacher was giving instructions to other students, we began walking towards the place where we had been told to go. He suddenly called us back. We had no idea what we had done wrong.
My friend went first. The teacher took a bamboo stick and struck his open palm three times. Hard. Then came my turn. I stretched out my hand, expecting the same punishment. Instead, the teacher struck me on the head, again and again, until the bamboo stick broke.
By then, blood was dripping from my head. I remember forcing myself not to cry because younger students were watching, and at that age I somehow believed crying in front of them would make the humiliation worse.
The physical pain eventually disappeared, but the memory lived on. Decades have passed, yet when I think about the incident, I still remember the shock, anger and helplessness. What troubles me now is perhaps greater than what I understood then. An adult entrusted with educating children had beaten a child on the head until he bled, without even explaining what the child had done wrong.
I did not tell my parents immediately because there seemed little point. The beating had already happened. Telling them would not remove the pain or undo the humiliation. They eventually heard about it from someone else and were furious, partly with the teacher and partly because I had kept it from them.
They complained to the headmaster, who had apparently witnessed part of what happened from his quarters. I remember feeling some relief when I learned that even the headmaster believed the teacher had crossed the line. But we were in a remote school. There was no easy system for taking the matter further. No photograph was uploaded within hours. No newspaper called. No social media post travelled across the country. Life went on.
These were hardly the only beatings we received during our school years. A Lopon might strike us on the head because we failed to reproduce a tune correctly. Another teacher might punish us because we forgot a lesson from the previous class. Students were beaten for fighting, arriving late for assembly, waking late in the hostel, making noise during study time, sleeping during evening study, or turning up late for prayers.
Corporal punishment lived inside the school system, and back then few of us questioned it. Parents rarely feared teachers. They worried more about older students bullying younger ones. Teachers occupied a position of enormous authority, and physical punishment was often described in softer language. It was discipline. It was correction. It was part of teaching children drig lam choe sum and making them behave.
Most students accepted it as another part of growing up. We got punished, complained among ourselves, waited for the pain to disappear, and went back to class.
That was the 1990s. Bhutan is a different country now. Recent reports of children being badly beaten in schools have therefore been disturbing. Photographs showing marks left on children's bodies make the issue harder to dismiss as a disagreement over teaching methods or discipline. There comes a point where discipline ends and violence begins.
A teacher striking a child hard enough to leave injuries is no longer teaching discipline. Fear is being imposed through physical force. Children misbehave. Of course they do. They fight, break rules, ignore instructions, arrive late, talk during lessons and test authority. Some students create serious disciplinary problems, and teachers working with large groups of children face situations that are exhausting and difficult.
None of this gives an adult permission to injure a child. Schools have other options. A teacher dealing with repeated misconduct should involve parents. Serious cases should go to the principal or school management. Schools should keep records, investigate incidents properly and apply established disciplinary procedures. And when behaviour becomes serious, parents school authorities should work with the parents.
Consequences still matter, but removing corporal punishment does not mean removing discipline. This distinction often gets lost whenever the subject comes up. Someone will inevitably say children are becoming difficult or teachers no longer have enough authority.
Authority does not require a cane. A good teacher does not need to frighten students into obedience. A school should teach children why actions have consequences rather than teaching them that the strongest person in the room has the right to inflict pain.
There is another problem with corporal punishment. Adults rarely agree on where the limit lies. One teacher might consider three strikes on the palm reasonable. Another might strike a child ten times. Someone else might hit the legs. Another teacher, angry in the heat of the moment, might strike the head.
My own experience began with a bamboo stick meant for the palm. Within seconds, the same stick was breaking against my head. Once physical punishment becomes an accepted tool of discipline, the boundary depends on the temper, judgement and self-control of the adult holding the stick. Children then carry the risk.
Looking back at my school years, I do not feel angry about every punishment I received. Some incidents have almost become comic memories among old classmates. We remember teachers chasing students around hostel corridors. We remember being caught sleeping during morning or evening study sessions. We remember desperately trying to avoid the next strike when we could not remember yesterday's lesson.
I remember the bamboo stick breaking on my head. I remember the blood. I remember standing there and refusing to cry. I remember wondering what I had done. Those details survived decades, and that alone should tell us something about what physical punishment does to a child.
The question today is not whether corporal punishment existed in our generation. It did. Nor should nostalgia become an excuse for preserving it. "We went through it and survived" is a poor standard for deciding what another generation should endure.
Our generation also walked long distances to school, studied without electricity in many places, lived in crowded hostels and had little contact with our parents for months. We do not insist that today's children must experience every hardship we experienced simply because we managed to grow up.
Education changes because society learns. I sometimes wonder where Bhutan's tradition of physical discipline came from. Perhaps some practices were influenced by older forms of monastic education, where strict obedience and physical correction were once common. Perhaps other influences came from older schooling systems elsewhere. I do not know enough to make that claim with confidence.
The origin matters less than what we choose now. A modern Bhutanese school should be a place where children understand boundaries and consequences, but where they are also physically safe.
Teachers deserve respect. They deserve support from parents and school administrators when dealing with difficult students. They should not be expected to tolerate abuse, violence or constant disruption from students. But respect works both ways.
When parents send a seven-year-old, a twelve-year-old or a sixteen-year-old through the school gate, they hand teachers enormous responsibility. For several hours each day, those adults exercise authority over someone else's child. That authority should never include the right to injure them.
There was a time when a child could return from school with a swollen hand and few people would ask questions. That time has passed, and it should stay in the past.
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