CLASSROOM VIOLENCE OP-ED: We banned corporal punishment but haven’t taught teachers what to replace it with

In a few weeks, thousands of student teachers will walk into South African classrooms for their teaching practicals and find themselves caught between two competing pressures related to discipline in the classroom: on the one hand, the well-established legal framework regarding their responsibilities towards children, and on the other, the normalisation of violence towards children in our society. These tensions frequently lead to profound ethical dilemmas which student teachers find themselves grappling with, often long after their return to university or college. How to manage these dilemmas is something that must be addressed in their training.

Corporal punishment, defined as any deliberate act against a child that inflicts pain or physical discomfort, has been outlawed in South African schools for 30 years, with a raft of laws, guidelines and judgments shoring up this ban. These include the South African Schools Act of 1996; the National Education Policy Act of 1996; the Abolition of Corporal Punishment Act of 1997; the Constitutional Court judgment in Christian Education South Africa v Minister of Education, 2000; the South African Council of Educators’ Ethical Code for Educators, 2024; and the recent Basic Education Laws Amendment Act.

Despite this comprehensive legal framework, student teachers regularly describe witnessing occurrences of physical punishment performed on children during their school observations and teaching practicals. The recent Child Gauge (2025) published by the Children’s Institute recognises that violence against children is a larger problem than what is observed in the classroom. “Corporal punishment must be understood as a structural problem, perpetuated by a broader system that has historically endorsed the use of violence as a legitimate means of disciplining learners. It is often a symptom of inadequate teacher training in classroom management, making it an accessible – albeit harmful – fallback strategy. In contexts where schools are underresourced, learner-to-teacher ratios are high, and in-class support for educators is limited, the likelihood of resorting to harsh disciplinary practices increases.”

Corporal punishment is one node in a web of violence that schools both suffer and reproduce. The tensions between the regulatory framework, social norms and the reality in classrooms makes this issue a complex one to research. We have several ways to build a picture of what is happening at schools in order to develop support strategies for student teachers:

First, official statistics (always to be read with caution!): for example, the South African Council of Educators, in its 2024/25 annual report tabled in Parliament, states that 606 new complaints of unprofessional conduct against teachers were recorded, with assault and corporal punishment the most common offences. The report frames these patterns as underscoring an urgent need for professional development in positive discipline, particularly among teachers who continue to apply corporal punishment, and 70 sanctioned teachers were directed to attend such programmes.

Second, the reflections of student teachers on what occurred during their teaching practicals provide further insight. In a qualitative research project at Stellenbosch University in 2024, student teachers were asked to reflect on their experiences around classroom management during their teaching practicals. We found several themes emerging, including: the experience of witnessing corporal punishment and not knowing how to deal with it, especially given that they had been taught that this was illegal; the knowledge that they needed to exert authority in the classroom, but were not actually “in control”, and that this sense of being in control was of critical importance to the perceived success of their teaching practical; and above all, that they need much more support and training around issues to do with classroom management.

Third, the public’s response to reported cases. The Western Cape Education Department recently reported 120 instances of corporal punishment in the 2025/26 financial year. This number is certainly the tip of the iceberg and must be read with national figures, together with the knowledge that most cases go unreported. More telling are the comments on a recent social media post about these reported cases. While comments on a Facebook post are certainly not a representative sample, the sentiments they carry are real, and it speaks directly to why corporal punishment persists in South African schools despite being legally prohibited.

The claim, which can be summarised as ‘I was hit and I am fine’, fits into a category known as naturalistic fallacy. Many of the 1,200 comments can be categorised into two camps: I was hit and I turned out fine; and children today are unruly precisely because the cane was taken away. Both are empirical claims, and the evidence supports neither. A University of Cape Town systematic review of 53 quantitative st…