Another teacher was quoted saying, “The law banning corporal punishment should be scrapped”.

When I worked with the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) parents came almost daily to my office to complain about teachers who had seriously injured their children. Some parents reported children admitted to hospital. In some rare cases students have been beaten to death by teachers.

Caning a student is a criminal offence. Corporal punishment was abolished almost a decade ago in this country, but teachers continue to cane students! An online journallist reports, ‘As a matter of fact, such cases have not stopped even with the government directive of banning caning and the ministry of education should have provided for an alternative discipline measure when it scrapped corporal punishment.’

This blogger who sounds like a caning culprit admits, ‘Corporal punishment is an outdated and archaic way of instilling discipline but the authorities concerned should come up with a clear alternative to discipline, otherwise caning will never stop in both public and private schools as majority of teachers do not know any other way of disciplining students.’

There have been calls for the re-introduction of corporal punishment in schools to curb the unrest but it now appears that the society has a big role to play in finding a solution to the problem. Corporal punishment is not a solution to addressing school strikes witnessed in the country. Scholars at Moi University faculty of Education said canning of students will not help solve the problem because the root causes of strikes have not been addressed.