CAIRO: A video of a supervisor insulting and beating pre-schoolers with a thick wooden ruler, posted Tuesday on Youtube, outraged Egyptians who called for reform.
The video was widely circulated on Facebook and Twitter, showing Magdy El-Shaer — who is a supervisor at the pre-school, not a certified teacher — shouting and beating a group of frightened children repeatedly.
He is seen at one point pulling a girl’s hair and severely beating her with the ruler on her head and back for not doing her homework. The girl sobs loudly and shivers, begging El-Shaer to let her go.
“This is not an individual incident,” pediatric psychiatrist Ahmed Aboul Wafa told Daily News Egypt. “It happens a lot in Egypt and these children come to my clinic everyday,” he added.
The pre-school is located in Zefta district in Gharbeya governorate.
An official at the Ministry of Education told DNE that the establishment falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Social Solidarity.
Deputy Minister of Social Solidarity in Gharbeya, Salama Nasr took responsibility for the incident in a telephone interview with ON TV’s “Baladna Bel Masry” talk show late Tuesday.
“The Ministry of Social Solidarity is completely responsible for giving this man a license to open a pre-school,” he said in a rare admission of responsibility by a government official.
Nasr vowed to shut down the nursery, adding that a complaint would be filed to the interior ministry against the perpetrator.
“What I’ve seen [in this video] is completely inhumane,” he added. El-Shaer, the owner of the pre-school, is a former employee of the Ministry of Youth and Sports.
The National Council for Childhood and Motherhood reportedly filed a complaint against El-Shaer to the Prosecutor General on Wednesday.
The council received 2,076 complaints linked to school violence against children on its hotline number 16,000 from the year 2005 to 2010, according to media reports.
The deputy of the Ministry of Education in Gharbeya said in a phone-in on the show that the pre-school accepts children less than four years of age.
Aboul Wafa explained that children younger than seven years old are incapable of associating beating as a repercussion for failing to complete their homework. “They just see the result, which is the beating, and they link it to school altogether,” he said.
Beating children that young leads to phobias, anxiety and depression, he added. “Some children may develop personality disorders and become anti-social.
“Others may drop out of school altogether, which happens a lot in Egypt.”
