‘Maybe that’s how they learned in the past, but we don’t learn like this today’: Youth perspectives on violent discipline in Lebanon’s public schools

Abstract

This paper explores students’ experiences of violent school discipline in three urban public schools in Lebanon. Despite being banned by Lebanon’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education, violent discipline, including corporal punishment and verbal humiliation, emerged repeatedly from student accounts as a key barrier to school engagement. Drawing on ethnographic data and a conceptual framework informed by postcolonial and critical peace research, we consider the interaction of various forms of violence in students’ experiences of schooling and embed these within Lebanon’s larger sociohistoric, legal, and policy contexts. The findings point to linkages between poverty and violent discipline, suggesting a schema for understanding the intersection of violences in schools.