As Teachers' Day approaches, revelations about corporal punishment and violence inflicted by teachers in the past are pouring out online. A review video of the 2006 film "To Sir, With Love" has drawn more than 2.51 million views and over 4,300 comments as of the 11th, with viewers continuing to share memories of wounds inflicted by their teachers during school years.
One comment read, "Teacher Choi, on Teachers' Day I sent cabbage that I had dug up from my grandmother's field, but you cut it in half in front of the other kids and told me to throw it in the food waste bin."
Other comments, which received thousands of likes, were filled with accounts of students being beaten so severely on the buttocks that they suffered lifelong tailbone pain, a disabled friend being sexually harassed, and students being forced to eat with their bare hands because their parents had not offered bribes. The stories were filled with recurring themes of assault, cash bribes and humiliation.
Such revelations are possible because corporal punishment by teachers was legally permitted at the time. South Korea did not explicitly prohibit corporal punishment in schools until 2010. From the 20th century through the early 2000s, the prevailing view among both teachers and parents was that "children only come to their senses when disciplined through corporal punishment."
Historically, there have been attempts to regulate corporal punishment. In 1966, principals in Seoul included "a complete ban on corporal punishment" in their code of conduct, and in 1979 the Ministry of Education banned corporal punishment through its student guidance guidelines. However, these were merely guidelines without legal enforcement.
An official ban was not enacted until after 2010. Kim Sang-kon, then Gyeonggi Province education superintendent, announced a student human rights ordinance that codified the ban on corporal punishment, and Seoul and Gwangju followed with similar ordinances. In March 2011, an enforcement decree of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was revised to explicitly prohibit direct corporal punishment. It was the first time the law halted the practice of striking students with sticks, golf clubs, slippers and drumsticks.
The issue is that the current crisis over teachers' authority is linked to this vicious cycle of the past, according to analysts. The students of that era have now become parents who go to extremes to protect their own children.
One comment, which drew thousands of sympathetic responses, read: "The teachers who beat students in the 1980s and 1990s are now retired and living well on their pensions, while the teachers in their 30s and 40s who grew up being beaten are now struggling as teachers' authority has collapsed."
Experts view this as a vicious intergenerational cycle. Young teachers today are bearing the karmic weight of the misdeeds of some past teachers, including bribes and corporal punishment. They also pointed to the psychological phenomenon of people feeling a sense of liberation by unburdening suppressed emotions after witnessing the satisfying revenge portrayed in the film.
