Sylvia's Journal

We had lunch at SOLA to say goodbye to baba Ted who is off to the US to do his scholarship collection miracles. While waiting for one of the guests we talked about the experience some of the girls had of being mentored by published authors in the US on their essays that they had submitted to Afghan Women’s Writers Project.

The experience of getting positive feedback and encouragement from such mentors or teachers in general is entirely alien to the students. Learning is associated with struggling to keep the teacher happy and lots of punishment, both psychological and corporal.

We told the two girls whose essays we had used in Sikkim about the reaction of the students there about their essays. One was about corporal punishment in schools. This was not mentioned in the essay that contrasted Afghan with American education. The Sikkimese children had talked much about such practices in India. We learned quickly that corporal punishment in Afghan schools is alive and well.

Several of the girls told us stories that made us cringe. Like a pencil threaded under and over the fingers and then slamming all fingers down. It’s a great way to break a kid’s fingers. Hitting a child on the head is apparently another common method by which teachers express discontent. F. told us about her classmate who, after being hit on the head with a heavy book had blood coming out of her nose, coloring her white chador red with blood. Z was eager to tell us her story; she got hit over the head by her teacher because she had misinterpreted her homework assignment. She had a headache for a week.

The most amazing thing is that they all laugh when they tell these stories. I asked whether parents didn’t get upset – in the US the school would have a lawsuit on its hands – but all told us that it was no use to send parents to school to complain because the teacher would simply say that the parents should take their child out of school if they weren’t happy with the methods of discipline.

These cruelties are inflicted by female teachers to female students. But they also have male teachers who cannot touch them and so the punishment is done by reducing grades or other forms of psychological harassment. Of course girls in this society are used to that. F told us that often, after we give her a ride to the corner of our street, saving her a long walk, the policeman standing there harasses her, calling her bad names because she gets out of a car with foreigners, worse, a car with a foreign man in it.