We banned the cane but said nothing about the words
By Persis Roberts
This may seem random. It is not.
I have been thinking about this for a very long time. And when I say a very long time, I mean since 2012. I have wondered, more times than I can count, where the people in this story are now — the teacher and especially the children. It bothered me then, as a quiet eighteen-year-old who did not know how to speak up. The feeling is, if anything, more intense now.
Maybe putting this here will start a conversation that is long overdue.
Parents already carry so much. They should not also have to lie awake wondering whether their child is emotionally and mentally safe inside a classroom — whether the words following their child home are the right kind.
But here we are.
I was eighteen years old when I first understood that a classroom could be a crime scene.
It was 2012. I had just completed Senior High School and, not wanting to sit idle at home while I waited for my results, I applied for a classroom assistant role at a basic school in Ghana. I was assigned to KG 1 to work alongside a teacher — let us call her Madam Peggy. I was excited. The children called me Auntie Persis. Three-to five-year-olds with gap-toothed smiles, sticky fingers, and the particular kind of trust that only small children offer so freely and completely. I helped them arrange their tables. I gave them hugs when they asked. I watched their faces light up when they got something right.
And then I watched Madam Peggy.
She was not cruel to all the children equally. Her favourites — the ones whose parents brought her gifts, whose school fees were never late, whose uniforms were always freshly pressed — were safe. But the others? The children whose parents could barely afford the term’s books, the ones who were slower to grasp a lesson, the ones who simply did not fit her idea of a worthy student? She had words for those children.
You are dumb. You are stupid. You are not smart. I cannot waste my time on you. You will repeat this class and grow old in it. Why are you always dirty?
To a three-year-old. To a four-year-old. To a five-year-old.
There was one girl in the class — the oldest, and clearly the one struggling the most. She did not speak. She did not lift her head. During recess, while the other children ran and shrieked with laughter across the compound, she sat perfectly still. She was Madam Peggy’s favourite target, and she seemed to have learned, in the way that small children learn things they should never have to, that the safest thing she could do was disappear.
She only came alive at the end of the school day, when her mother appeared at the gate. The moment she saw her, something in her face unlocked. For a few seconds, she was a child again.
I was eighteen, shy, and terrified of losing my placement. I consoled the children quietly when they cried. I told myself this was how things were.
I have regretted that silence ever since.
Before I go further, let me be clear about something. This is not an indictment of the teaching profession. Ghana’s classrooms are full of men and women who show up daily — often underpaid, under-resourced, and under-appreciated — and pour genuine care into shaping the minds of the next generation. This piece is not for them, or rather, it is not about them. It is about the ones who should not be in a classroom at all.
And it is particularly about the children at the receiving end who are least equipped to survive it.
The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget identified the ages of roughly two to seven years as the Preoperational Stage — a period of extraordinary cognitive growth during which a child is rapidly acquiring language, building their first understanding of the world, and most critically, forming their earliest sense of self. A child in KG 1 or KG 2 is, by definition, in the middle of this stage. They are not yet capable of abstract logical reasoning. They cannot step outside themselves and evaluate a situation critically. They cannot think: “Madam Peggy is having a bad day” or “this says more about her than it does about me.” They do not have those tools yet.
What they do have is an almost total dependence on the adults around them to tell them who they are. At this stage, the adult’s voice does not just influence a child’s self-concept — it largely constructs it. When a trusted authority figure looks at a three-year-old and says “you are stupid, you are dirty, I cannot waste my time on you,” the child does not argue. They do not file a complaint. They do not reach for their phone to record it. They absorb it. Quietly, efficiently, and at a depth that no subsequent reassurance fully reaches.
This is why I am not writing about university students, secondary school students, or even upper primary children — though verbal abuse at those levels is equally unacceptable and deserves its own conversation. I am writing about the ones who cannot clearly articulate their distress. The ones who cannot tell you at the dinner table what happened today. The ones who express what they experienced not in words but in silence — in a child who stops playing at recess, stops lifting her head, stops being a child — while the adults around her wonder why.
These are the children who need affirmation from their caregivers more than at any other stage of their development. And some of them are spending six hours a day, five days a week, being told the opposite.
We banned the cane but said nothing about the words
Ghana has made genuine, if uneven, progress on the question of physical punishment in schools. The Ghana Education Service has officially prohibited corporal punishment — a necessary step, one that came after years of advocacy. And in October 2025, Vice President Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang stood at the Ghana Teacher Prize celebration and issued an unambiguous warning: teachers who abuse students will face swift and decisive sanctions. Transfers, she said, would no longer be used as a quiet exit for those who betray the trust of the children in their care.
That is important. It is necessary.
But it is incomplete.
Because while we have argued about the cane, we have said almost nothing about the tongue. And the tongue, it turns out, does damage we are only beginning to fully measure.
Aba Dope — TikTok personality, Onua TV presenter, and one of Ghana’s most talked-about socialites — sat across from Delay on national television in 2023 and told the country something that should have stopped us cold. In secondary school, a teacher pulled her out of a beauty pageant queue in front of her peers and redirected her to the school choir — because, in his assessment, she was simply not beautiful enough to compete. She has said publicly that this moment is part of the reason she later bleached her skin.
Aba Dope was a teenager when those words were spoken to her. She had the vocabulary to name the humiliation, even if she could not immediately protect herself from it.
Now ask yourself: what does that same category of words do to a child who is three years old? A child who has no language yet for what is being done to them. No framework. No context. Only the feeling — absorbed into the body before the mind can process it — that they are not enough.
What the science says
This is not sentiment. This is neuroscience.
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Research presented at the UK Parliament as recently as April 2025 confirmed what brain imaging has been showing us for years: verbal abuse does not merely cause emotional pain. It physically alters the developing brain. Children who are routinely shamed, belittled, or threatened by the adults in their lives develop a hyperactive threat system — meaning that even neutral social cues, a facial expression, or a well-meaning joke begin to register as danger. Their brain’s reward system becomes blunted, making it harder to trust, to connect, to feel safe enough to learn.
Harvard Medical School research put it in terms that should make every parent and policymaker pause: verbal abuse from a trusted adult causes the same measurable psychiatric harm as witnessing domestic violence.
Madam Peggy’s words were not just unkind. In the most literal neurological sense, they were an intervention into those children’s developing brains. Every single day. Before lunch.
UNICEF estimates that approximately 3.4 million children in Ghana have experienced physical or emotional abuse. One of the key factors keeping those numbers high, according to UNICEF’s own research, is the cultural normalisation of harsh treatment in schools and homes as an acceptable way to manage children’s behaviour. We have named the problem. We have not yet decided, as a society, to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
The gap nobody is monitoring
On paper, Ghana has frameworks. The Ghana Education Service has introduced guidelines on school discipline and psychosocial support. Guidance and counselling units exist in schools across the country.
But a 2026 study in the British Journal of Education found that these guidelines are implemented sporadically — particularly outside urban centres — and that counselling units remain chronically underfunded and understaffed. Teachers, the same study found, frequently feel ill-equipped to manage children’s emotional and behavioural needs through anything other than punishment. And so punishment — in one form or another — remains the default.
Here is the problem with verbal abuse specifically: nobody sees it.
The cane leaves marks. A bruise can be photographed, reported, and pursued through official channels. But nobody is in the classroom when a teacher tells a four-year-old that she is too stupid to bother with. No inspector records the moment a child’s name becomes, inside a room that is supposed to be a place of possibility, a synonym for failure. No form exists for what was done to the little girl who stopped playing at recess. No policy has named what was done to Aba Dope in that pageant queue.
Who is monitoring what Ghana’s teachers say to our children when we are not there?
What we are not yet ready to discuss
The girl from my classroom is in her late teens or early twenties now. I do not know what became of her. I know what her days looked like. I know she did not speak. I know she did not play. I know that the only relief she found inside that school building was the moment it ended and her mother came.
I still remember some of the unkind words spoken to me as a child. I suspect you do too. Most of us carry at least one sentence from a classroom or a schoolyard that lodged somewhere it was not supposed to and never fully left. Words have a way of outlasting almost everything else — the paint on the walls gets refreshed, the teachers retire, the schools change their names — but the sentences stay.
You are not smart. I cannot waste my time on you.
In 2026, with everything we now know about child development, about the neuroscience of early trauma, about the lifelong consequences of what happens in those first years of learning — are we ready to have an honest national conversation about the words our children are hearing in their classrooms?
Are we ready to move beyond banning the cane and start asking what replaces it — not just in policy language, but in practice, in training, in accountability?
The Ghana Education Service has a Code of Conduct. The Vice President has made a public commitment. These are starting points. But we need specific, enforceable standards around verbal and emotional conduct in the classroom. We need mandatory psychosocial training for teachers — not optional workshops, not aspirational guidelines buried in a document nobody reads. We need Parent-Teacher Associations, which the Vice President herself has called to be revived, to understand that the question is not only “Was my child hit today?” but “What words is my child hearing?”
And we need to start this conversation at the crèche and KG level. Because by the time a child has spent three years being told they are worthless, the brain has already begun, quietly and efficiently, to believe it.
So here is the question I have been sitting with since 2012, and the one I will leave with you:
If we would not allow a stranger on the street to call our child stupid, ugly, or a waste of time — why are we still allowing it behind a classroom door?
Persis Roberts is a journalist and communications professional with over six years of experience in Ghana’s media industry. She is passionate about child welfare and development, and the lasting impact of early childhood experiences on adult mental health. Through her writing, she seeks to start conversations that protect children, challenge harmful norms, and inspire meaningful change.
Sources:
- UNICEF Ghana — Prevention of Violence and Abuse Against Children: unicef.org/ghana/prevention-violence-and-abuse-against-children
- Vice President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, Ghana Teacher Prize 2025: ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Teachers-who-abuse-students-will-be-dealt-with-precisely-Vice-President-2004223
- Aba Dope interview, The Delay Show (GhanaWeb, 2023): ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/entertainment/My-teacher-sacked-me-from-beauty-contest-to-choir-TikToker-Aba-Dhope-reveals-why-she-bleached-1862399
- British Journal of Education, Vol. 14(2), 2026 — Addressing the Roots of School Bullying: eajournals.org/bje/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Addressing-the-Roots-of-School-Bullying.pdf
- Neuroscience News / The Conversation — Verbal abuse rewires the developing brain (May 2025): neurosciencenews.com/verbal-abuse-child-brain-28886
- Harvard Medical School — Verbal abuse and brain pathways: hms.harvard.edu/news/cutting-words-may-scar-young-brains
