Corporal Punishment:Children's Attitude toward Schooling

Teacher should be caring, nurturing, and developing minds and talents of his students. While imparting knowledge a teacher uses punitive as well as non punitive techniques. The present study made an effort to see the influence of teacher inflicted punishment in students' attitude towards schooling. In order to find out level of teacher inflicted punishment, Intensity of Punishment Scale was used. Attitude toward Schooling Scale was used to asses the students' attitude towards their teacher, school curriculum and school climate. The sample consisted of 132 boys and 118 girls with a mean age of 9 years belonging to lower middle class socio economic status with almost similar back ground. All the 4th and 5th grade children from three randomly selected municipal primary schools of Tirupati (N=250) were included in the sample. The obtained correlation values indicated negative relationship between the intensity of teacher inflicted punishment and children's attitude towards schooling. The present study stresses the need for adopting more humane disciplinary techniques on the part of the teacher while dealing with the children.