-Corporal punishment in schools is illegal. Teachers are not allowed to beat the students, or even abuse them verbally. However, this is not the case in one of the classes of Petit Verger Government School in Moka.

The parents claim that the teacher beats the pupils and even calls them names as it pleases him.
“The teacher took up the class at the start of the year since the teacher who was working with the class the previous year was promoted to a higher rank. At first, we saw that he was not working so well but no one pressurized him; he had a minor accident following which, he faced some problems with his arm.

However, the performance of the pupils started deteriorating and the pupils showed disinterest in going to school,” a group of parents told this paper.

When the pupils were questioned by their parents at home, they related the daily routine of the teacher in the class.

“The pupils told us how the teacher was lazy in class. He used to sleep on his chair and dribble on his shirt. Often he was absent and even if he was in school, he would leave the pupils many times to smoke cigarettes,” they said.

“He rarely corrected the copybooks of the children, the first time he corrected their work, it was in January and the second time was in September. We told ourselves that at least our children will learn in tuitions and did not make an issue of all this. But then the teacher went too far when he started beating the pupils,” the parents added.

According to them, the teacher kicked the pupils, knocked their heads on walls and abused them verbally.
One parent confessed: “Once I went to talk to the teacher to tell him to mend his ways in the class. Frustrated, he vent  his anger on my child by ignoring the latter completely. For those who happened to escape his beatings, they received verbal abuses. He called them names that we would never dare to say in front of children. The children further narrated to us how he punished a boy by making him kneel down and hold a wheel above his head.

Another parent affirmed that when the teacher realised they were writing to the Ministry against him, he called at her place to threaten her.