The purpose of teacher training programmes is to instil a humanistic ideology into the school curriculum. Unfortunately however, this is not always able to change the culture of a school. The Pupil Control Ideology (PCI) scale was designed to measure the pupil control orientation of the respondents (teachers) on a humanistic-custodial continuum. This continuum has "custodialism" at one extreme and "humanism" at the other. A random sample of 154 teachers was chosen from 400 South African teachers and 95 teachers from 300 Indian teachers from India. Each teacher was given the 20 item pupil control ideology scale. Analysis indicates that there is no significant mean difference between the results of the two groups except for certain items. The results indicate that power and control flow downward, there is strict control over pupils and impersonal teacher-pupil relationships (reflecting pessimism), and there is a prevalence of watchful mistrust. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)