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He says that if the teachers are trained, they don't need to depend on corporal punishment. Here's how he explained why:

Hon. Patrick Faber - Minister of Education
"The president of the BNTU in his presentation answered himself - the alternative to corporal punishment is training for our teachers and that is what we have always said. I listened as the president said that we are waiting to amend the rules or bring in the new rules in order to instill and start training. I don't understand where he's going with that. Training, in fact you remember, when the act was actually passed in the national assembly and signed into law - we held back on the law dealing with corporal punishment for six months over which time all our continuous professional development workshops were geared towards giving strategies. Of course these strategies are also imparted in the training sessions over the CERTED for the Associate's degree program, the Bachelor's in education programs that were various teacher training institutions. The answer, my friend and everybody else who has a role to play, is training. And I make the examples time and time again, if you have a teacher that cannot recognize that a child is acting up because he may have some learning disorder, if you have a teacher who may not be able to look at a child's situation and think 'you know there's something else going on apart from just his acting out' and maybe it's something from home and they are not willing to check into the homes; if you have teachers who don't implement routines and rules in their classrooms - they are going to have problems with behavior and feel frustrated and feel like they have to hit the children. But if we have teachers who are trained to recognize how children learn that they can have potential difficulties and that there are things that they can do in order to help to correct the behavior of these children - they won't feel the need so much to have corporal punishment there. I say to the teachers and to everybody else, if they want to prove me wrong and that training is not the answer then lets get the training and see if you still can't handle the children and then I'll be the first to go back on what I'm saying now, but until then. We are at 54% trained teachers at the primary school level, lets get it up much higher and you will see that you will be less dependent on corporal punishment."