The principal of a college in Myanmar’s Bago Region has been called out on Facebook for overreacting to her students partying on campus last week and beating several of them with a wooden stick.
In a post that has garnered more than 10,000 reactions and 2,000 comments, Min Shu Shein, a student at the Government Technical Institute in Letpadan Township, describes the confusion that led to the principal’s violent outburst.
He writes that the students had received permission from the college to hold a Thingyan party on March 15 from 8am to noon. However, since the party started an hour later than expected, they negotiated with a teacher to continue until 2pm.
“We assured him that we would take responsibility for any problems that might arise. We also worked hard to ensure that no problems arose,” he writes.
Nonetheless, school principal, Dr. Witt Yee Hlaing, shut off the party’s power source at 1pm. The students thought they were experiencing a blackout, so they hooked a party up to a generator they had brought in case of such an emergency.
“Angry and enraged by this, [Dr. Witt Yee Hlaing] got onto the dancefloor and hit people with a stick. We learned that [one student] was beaten badly,” Min Shu Shein writes in his post.
“Students, regardless of whether they are hit or not, know that things like this shouldn’t happen,” his post continues. “There is never a reason to be brandishing a stick. We are not children or minors.”
While we have no explanation for the student’s implication that it’s acceptable to beat children with a stick, we do have what appears to be a response from Dr. Witt Yee Hlaing to his allegations. (We haven’t been able to independently verify that the comment was written by the principal, but it has been repeatedly cited as such in the comments under the original post.)
Most of the commenters, somewhat surprisingly, appear to agree with Dr. Witt Yee Hlaing:
This was the most anti-stick beating comment we could find:
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