Learning to Use the Switch

Abstract

In this essay, Bingham explores his own practice of using corporal punishment as a teacher in Apartheid South Africa between 1983 and 1987. He was a white teacher and his students were Black, and while he was a progressive anti-Apartheid worker, he nevertheless partook in the neocolonial practice of inflicting physical harm on his students. Bingham was a respected teacher because his students achieved academic success, but also because colleagues and parents were very satisfied that he hit his kids hard. Indeed, the practice of corporal pedagogy was as central to his identity as an anti-Apartheid worker as his ability to speak the Xhosa language with fellow teachers and community members. As Bingham examines in this essay, the experience of corporal pedagogy stands in stark relief with his generally pacifist life. Using the lenses of Fanon and Freire, this essay theorizes the ambivalences of this teaching experience. Bingham makes the case, along with Fanon and Freire, that oppression, especially in the case of colonial corporal pedagogy, traps the oppressed as well as the oppressor, but it also traps those who would side with the oppressed with seemingly good intentions.