School days are those when even though major focus always is on studies, students are more interested in making friends, playing sports, playing pranks, and consequently receiving punishments. Innocence is at the extreme as students discover new boundaries, try to scale new heights, and undergo all sorts of challenges with their friends.
However, a group of students in one of Karachi’s schools did the unthinkable and played a prank at an extreme level, which led to severe events.
Here is the whole story described by Ibrahim Tanweer:
“There is a private school in Karachi, The Indus Academy. I have recently come to know through a reliable source, of a few disturbing happenings at this school that have deeply angered me and I believe this institution and its people should be held accountable.
(What follows is an account that I have received and had verified however, I accept that it is possible for certain details to be discrepant with reality. If you were physically present while all of this was happening and would like to inform me that certain aspects of it are not true, feel free to comment – I do not wish to post irresponsibly)
Apparently, this chain of events was set in motion by certain disciplinary issues involving their secondary school students all occurring within the space of a week. From what I have heard, some students were caught using profanity, some contraband was recovered from a few students’ bags and most worryingly, a group of boys urinated in a bottle and apparently threw it on members of the school’s administrative staff.
While these issues can certainly be considered to be serious and/or disgusting breaches of school discipline and may require, in some cases, drastic measures like suspension/expulsion, how the school’s Principal and administration chose to respond was not only extreme but disgusting and inhumane.
Since the culprits in some of these cases had not been identified, the school chose to have their entire senior section stand in the school ground from 7:40 AM to 10:45 AM. For three hours, the students were not allowed to use the toilet and were reprimanded for shifting their weight or showing other signs of exhaustion. The canteen was ordered to not provide food or water to any of the senior school students. Some of the children were dragged in lines by teachers pulling their shirt collars and neckties. All the while, these students were verbally abused, threatened, intimidated, humiliated, and in some cases told by a teacher that they “looked like troublemakers” because she “didn’t like the way their face looked.”
The Principal of this school, also ordered her teachers to administer a few extreme punishments which included taking the boys who had been caught using profanity to the toilet where they were punished by having a bar of soap stuffed into their mouth and rubbed on their tongues. This also led to one child having an asthma attack.
At the end of the day, most of the children were physically exhausted, overwhelmed, starving and in a state of tears. This principal and a few of her teachers chose to act on their deep seated sadistic impulses, egregiously abusing their authority, and tormenting children that they had been charged with the care of, not to mention what they are also being handsomely paid for. This school is supposed to be one of the better private schools in Karachi and this is how they chose to treat their children. I understand that kids can be little terrors sometimes, the kids who pulled the pee-in-a-bottle stunt also displayed callousness and stupidity but as education professionals in a private school, the literal minimum you can do is to know how to resolve even the worst of situations without resorting to terrorizing children with violence and abuse.
These “education professionals” must be called out and must answer for their actions. We have too much going on in this country for the well-educated, supposedly responsible members of our society to behave this way unchecked.”
Whatever the truth may be in all of this, one thing for sure is that both the parties should keep themselves in check. Children, especially students, are not to be manhandled and treated like this. First, because they are not your own children. Second, they are only children, even in high schools. The same goes for the students as well: respect to get respect. Let us all hope this was all just an overly exaggerated summation.