Undesirable Consequences of Practicing Corporal Punishment to Discipline Misbehaving Students in Schools
Despite corporal punishment is officially banned, it is common practice in the Eritrean school system. However, there is an acute absence of empirical information about the impact of harsh disciplining techniques used by teachers and school leaders in Eritrea. The paper mainly focuses on the consequences of the existing school based disciplining techniques on students’ educational, behavioral, psychological, emotional and relationships mosaics in the secondary schools. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 526 participants of different groups of school community and stakeholders in Asmara. Specifically 67 school teachers and 403 secondary school students involved through selfadministered questionnaire and 43 key informants took part in FGDs. The study also used school based field observations to gather relevant data. Corporal punishment is most commonly used students’ disciplining technique in the schools. The finding revealed that punishment decreases students’ motivation and interests in learning by associating subject areas with the punishing teachers.
