COMMENT | Teachers need to learn "disciplining with dignity." This is today's educational keys. That’s the phrase that came to my mind when I read about the case in Johor where a student was caned by a teacher for calling the latter “effeminate”.

I recall a saying in Islam about teaching. The prophet Muhammad once said, “Teach your children according to the times they are in.”

Then I thought of my 30-year experience as a classroom teacher in Malaysia and the United States, teaching teachers how to teach today’s children, based on the “time they are living in.”

For more than a decade, I taught American teachers who would be teaching children in challenging urban environments such as The Bronx and Harlem in New York City, and in Paterson and Englewood in New Jersey. These are very tough urban areas. I have worked with very challenging students myself – so-called “at-risk-youths” whose next step often led to incarceration, if education failed them...