Shades of brutality: students’ experience at the hands of teachers

The last two weeks have seen the world coming together in condemning acts of police brutality and racism, following the death of George Floyd, an African-American male in the hands of police in the United States of America.
Thousands upon thousands of people across the world are protesting – all with one message; that we are one people.
Even social distancing rules were abandoned, perhaps reminding us that the pain of one, is the pain of all. Today, I want us to shift our gaze just for a moment, from the extreme cases of brutality we see on the media, to a different shade of brutality - teacher brutality.
 I have two incidents to recall in relation to this.About five years ago, a picture of my former school teacher was shared on Facebook. Seeing the picture was indeed refreshing and gave me a beautiful sense of nostalgia, but this joy did not last long.
 When I read through some of the comments on that picture, I came across several long, angry comments by former classmates.
One of the contributors recounted experiences where he was treated brutally by that teacher, and even went further to say that the way he was treated by that teacher during his time in school negatively influenced his whole life.
In a second incident about two years ago, I had just made a new friend who, as we soon came to learn, had gone to the same school as I did, albeit in two different times.
He recounted a day he visited the school and realized that most of its infrastructure was very worn out. He said however, that despite being financially capable, he did not feel inspired to sup-port the school. He recounted how he felt that he was treated brutally by teachers just because he appeared relatively deviant when com-pared to other students.
He for instance sought to be given the opportunity to explain his position before being punished, which he was not given in most cases.
Instead, he was taken for a big-headed student who resisted authority. He went on to emotion-ally recount being banned from a class for an entire term, and only allowed to sit for the final examination.
Thanks to his intellectual ability, independent studying efforts, and friends who were willing to tutor him after class, he passed his examinations – passed very well, in fact.
Now, incidents of teach-er brutality have been reported in Tanzania over the years, where students have been tortured and even lost lives at the hands of teachers.
These are just the extreme cases which benefit the spotlight of the media. Behind these, there are more cases of stifled talent, lost dreams and even completely derailed lives, which are results of the many shades of teacher brutality.
This topic comes at such an important moment. Schools have been closed due to Covid-19, and hope-fully, soon enough all of them will be reopened. It is the hope of many people the unprecedented times the world has seen, will become watershed moments.
That loss and pain will not be in vain. That from loss and pain, emanates true change. In the case of education, our system should not treat deviance as outright wrong. In fact, most talented people are deviants rather than conformists.
 As it was once said, “the deviant and the conformist...are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination”.
Indeed, not all deviance is negative and without it we’d never change the world.
This is to call for more tolerance of deviance and compassion from teachers to students. Brutality comes in many forms and while a normal, peaceful life and extreme brutality are two ends of a continuum, there are many shades of grey area in between which deserve attention.

Epiphania Kimaro writes about leadership, and personal and career growth.