Corporal punishment is to be banned in all elementary, middle and high schools in Seoul from Monday. Schools have fixed a new set of regulations to ban all forms of corporal punishment, according to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education on Sunday.“Over 99 percent of all public and private schools have revised their regulations as of Friday,” said an official at the education office. “From Monday onward, all forms of physical punishment, regardless of their purpose and intensity, are to be strictly forbidden.” Minor violations are to be dealt with directly by the schools but the education office may interfere in cases of continuous or intense violence and impose an administrative sanction, officials said.

The schools’ moves were based on the policy of the liberal Seoul educational head Kwak No-hyun, who firmly vowed to abolish physical punishment in schools. They also followed a recent scandal in which several elementary school teachers used excessive violence on their students under the pretext of disciplinary action. However, many schools lack a substitute means of maintaining discipline.

The SMOE suggested in September a face-to-face counseling program as a guiding system for disobedient students but few schools have actually adopted it, mostly due to the lack of budget or manpower. The office, vowing to promote an anti-corporal punishment campaign, will thus send out detailed guiding manuals to schools on dealing with students. It will also keep close watch on 15 sample schools before coming up with additional measures, officials said. “The corporal punishment ban is a motto which we plan to push ahead,” said an SMOE official.

“The age-old customs will, of course, not disappear all at once, so we will gradually work on eliminating them phase by phase.” Corporal punishment, together with the admissions officer system, has been the most controversial issue in educational circles this year, especially as the SMOE and the Educational Ministry took opposing stances.

Also, most teachers were reluctant to adopt a full ban on punishment. According to a recent survey by the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Association on Seoul teachers, 68.2 percent of the respondents thought the ban was inappropriate. The KFTA also filed a petition to the ministry to legislate a law which permits corporal punishment under limited circumstances, claiming that the present moral hazard among students may not be controlled otherwise.