Why force for
using right hand?
How many times have you been punished
for using yours left hand in yours childhood or at school?
Certainly many times .what where those
punishment like? Simple threaten or you had been beaten blue and black?
These are the information that I
personally acquired when I interviewed some of my leftie friends, elders and
teacher.
"I
was educated in my remote village school. My left hand was beaten until it was
swollen, so I started to use my right hand" said one of my friends.
"I
had a teacher who would smack my left hand with a yardstick every time she
caught me writing with my left hand”.
"My
class teacher would force me to use my right hand to perform all of my school
work. If she caught me using my left hand, I was hit in the head with a book as
big as dictionary. It turned out that she believed left handers were connected with
devil (rakches)."
"Was given pen with left hander
nib as matter of course" (hooray!)
"Not much awareness or
understanding in 70's and 80's (still!), was tested by "specialist"
to determine the extent of my "disability"
My one of the teacher in college
sheared a story about his left handed friend. It was the sad story of the
Baglung district of the year 2047. Teacher and his friend used to study on
grade 8.
“It
was the beginning of ours new session on the school. I had heard that we had
the new mathematics teacher in our school .He was from dargiling.At the time math’s teacher
had a different respect than others, a fearful respect. Every one used to get
afraid of the math’s teacher like those of DI (discipline in charge) of present
days. I and my friend were on the first bench of the class as always .My friend
was a left hander. Also had the most beautiful writing in our class. When that
teacher , whose name was probably Kashab
kumar Jha entered to our class, gave a strange look to every student .
Amazingly he called a boy in front
of the class .He was my same left hander friend and told to write tables of
18.He started to write and when teacher noticed him he shouted at him “ Gu dhune haat la lakhna sharam lagdaina”.(don’t
you feel shame to use shit washing hand
for writing).From that day onwards he started to beat my little friend with the
very thin stick on the left hand when he saw him writing with left hand. He did
this for more than 6 months until my friend completely stopped using his “gu
Dhune haat” as coated by that teacher, for writing”.
These are some true and a factual story
which a every community having left handers have. There are probably thousands
of other such stories which present the domination over the left handers since
the centuries, I feel likely to call it
the most neglected minority of the world. As far as I have seen ,studied
and observed there are two reasons why left handers are forced on using their
opposite hand.
1.
Practical oddness
or social adjustment
“On an average about 90% of the
population of the society are right handers. So it is sure for 10%of population
to feel difficulties and clumsiness. So it is better to shift left handers to right”
said my teacher who tried me to convert into right hander but unfortunately he
could not. Also some left handers are themselves converted due to difficulty on
handling the instrument by left hand such as scissors, knives etc which I have
tried to detect in the upcoming lines………………………
2.
Religious/cultural
point of view
This
is generally the problem of the uneducated or semi-educated family where people
regard the use of left hand as the initiation of the bad luck. They have the
conception that the left hand is a devils hand which should be only used for
urination and other expiratory habits along with personal hygiene………………
Due to cultural and societal pressures,
many left-handed children are encouraged or forced to write and perform other
activities with their right hands. This conversion can cause multiple problems in the developing left-handed
child, including learning disorders, dyslexia, stuttering and other speech disorders. Shifts from left- to right-handed are
more likely to be successful than right to left, though neither have a high
success rate to begin with. Successful shifters are more likely to become ambidextrous
than unsuccessful ones. Conversions can be successful with consistent daily
practice in a variety of manual activities.
Many Asian
countries encourage or force their children to become right-handed due to
cultural perceptions of bad luck associated with the left hand. In the
countries like India, Nepal, Srilanka and Indonesia, it is considered rude to
eat with the left hand. In a 2007
study in Taiwan, 59.3%
of left hander children studying in high school had been forced to convert from
left-handedness to right-handedness. The study took the account of education
status of the children's families and found that children whose parents had
less education were more likely to be forced to convert. Even among children
whose parents had higher levels of education, the conversion rate was 45.7%. Among naturally left-handed
Japanese senior high school students, only 0.7%
and 1.7% of individuals used their
left hand for writing and eating, respectively, though young Japanese are
more likely to convert to using chopsticks right-handed than forks or spoons (29.3% to 4.6%). The proportion of
females subjected to forced conversion is significantly higher compared to
males (95.1% to 81.0%).Malawians cite their views
that "the left hand is less skilled and less powerful than the right
one" as main reasons for forcing left-handers to convert. Among students,
teachers and parents, 75% said the
left hand should not be used to perform habitual activities, and 87.6% of these believed left-handers
should be forced to switch dominant hands. Parents and close relatives and
teachers are most responsible for impressing these beliefs upon their children.
Western
countries also attempt to convert left-handed children due to cultural,
societal and religious basis. Schools tend to urge children to use their right
hands, sometimes against the wishes of the child's parents. In America
until corporal punishment was outlawed in schools it was
not uncommon for students to be physically punished for writing with their left
hands.
