I started this thread in GQ. So what’s your opinion; should corporal punishment be allowed in schools? If so how should it be conducted? Would you allow your (real or hypothetical) children to recieve it (do/would you practice CP at home)? If you’re a teacher/administrator would you administer it? Why or why not?
I’m against it (but I’ll admit I may not be the best person to ask). My school district had CP in theory, but not in practice. My parents (except for 2 occasions) didn’t use CP at home. I have no children, but if I did I can’t imagine that’d I’d use CP or allow their school too. I don’t like the idea of teaching children that someone bigger and stonger than them is ever allowed to hurt them. If CP isn’t allowed on prisioners (or is it ) why should it be allowed on schoolchildren?
I don’t have kids, but if I did, and said kid needed an attitude adjustment, I’d do it myself. So I’m against it. To me, allowing teachers to wail on a kid is tantamount to allowing a cop to issue a little stick time to deal with skateboarders.
:eek: My lord. No way. I’m not sure about CP for parents and children. But it it’s a small child and it’s mild, well maybe that’s approprate for a kid who’s about to pull a lamp on their head. After that, talk to them like the human beings they are.
And unless they killed 24 kidergarters and ate their heads, just call me up and tell me and I’ll deal with it. Don’t fucking hit my kids.
I should add that my mother and her brothers had some very unpleasant experiences with CP when she was in grade school (early 60s). My uncle had his head shoved into a (plaster) wall by a teacher. The school did nothing to the teacher and my grandmother pulled them out of school. However that’s clearly be child abuse and I doubht any rational person is going argue teachers should be able to go that far.
It doesn’t teach children that someone bigger and stronger is allowed to hurt them, it teaches them that if they do wrong, there are consequences. With the case of prisoners, well the CP is them sitting in jail doing their time, which is a far more severe punishment than a tap on the ass with a paddle.
Here’s where I swim against the Doper tide and say “yea” because dammit, if it was good enough for us, it’s good enough for kids nowadays. And I’m sure that people will come up with real cites and whatnot but this is IMHO and that’s what I have, and I’ve thought about it many, many times over the years and I still say there should be corporal punishment in schools.
There should be clear policy and if parents want to opt out, I guess I could work that option in. But having to go visit the vice principal and get whacks because of something you did made you learn right quick to stop doing that shit. My husband will tell you that it only took one time, in the third grade, when he was paddled to make him realize that inappropriate behavior would not be tolerated at school. I will tell you that just thinking about getting paddled was enough to make me alter my behavior. Those were consequences that I decided I’d rather not deal with.
To assure you that I understand the difference between corporal punishment and abuse, I will share yet another anecdote. When he was 15, my husband was thrown down a flight of concrete stairs by a coach for refusing to turn out for a team. That is flat-out abuse and should not be tolerated.
I had a variety of tools in my kit when raising my kids and they revolved around the same principle…don’t do anything that you won’t accept the consequences of. Speeding includes a fine and increased insurance rates if you are caught; therefore you shouldn’t speed if you aren’t willing to pay those consequences. Lying to mom will get you grounded; don’t lie if you want to go out this weekend. Saying you’re bored will soon find you doing a chore. If you know the rules include the possiblity of being whacked when broken, then I guess you better think long and hard about breaking them.
Consistency is important. Of course, my kids always knew what the consquences were in advance, because I don’t believe in those kind of surprises.
Which essentially means nothing. It was good enough once to do a lot of stupid things. If we didn’t change the way we behave we’d be living on caves in our own filth.
No. It’s assault, and bullying, pure and simple, and I’m quite sure it will encourage the bullies in our schools even more. After all, if the teacher does it, why can’t they ?
Also, it just begs for a lawsuit the first time a teacher hits a child without parental permission ( and they will, once they get the idea that it’s okay to smack kids around ). And, it’s a setup ripe for escalation, unless the teachers are very careful picking victims; small, passive kids who won’t fight back, the kids who are already being bullied. If they do pick a kid who fights back, the situation could get quite unpleasant and legally messy; what if the kid stabs the would-be “disciplinarian” with a pencil or hits him with a chair and claims it was self defense ?
True or if they hit a kid who’s parents opted out and s/he fights back. And since the student could in all likely hood be smaller/weaker than the teacher the student would be justified in using an implement in self-defence even if the teacher used only their hand.
I was one who went through corporal punishment in public school and I don’t think people envision it the right way. I had maybe 7 paddlings through junior high and high school and the whole thing has a big yawn factor for me. We had a choice between X amount of licks, the same number of days detention, or the same number of days suspension. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever decided against the licks for one of the other punishments because you would be an idiot to. It didn’t really hurt and it was over right away. I don’t even see how someone could get scarred by it. It was a really big non-issue that got the point across immediately and then it was gone. To this day, I wish I could have corporal punishment instead of some of the various sanctions that the typical adult has to deal with.
I don’t buy the argument that teaching people that might makes right is somehow bad. Might does make right in most everyday situations and all police activity is backed up with the threat of force possible including death. Try resisting continually during a traffic stop sometime and see what happens.
No, teachers should not be allowed to hit my kid. Give me a call, and if the situation warrents, I’ll drive over and give a few wacks myself, but no one else should be allowed to touch them.
Yanno, there’s a difference between the teacher being able to slug a student and a student having to go the the principal’s office to receive punishment for a particular activity.
We used to do a lot of things that are/were bad and we used to do things that are/were good. Corporal punishment worked, just like other forms of punishment work. Non-punishment, such as detention with your other slacker friends or suspension which is just time off to hang with your loser friends, begets more of the same behavior. Being allowed to get away with basically anything that you want in school makes it harder for parents to discipline at home as well. IME, IMO, YMMV, and so on.
To those that feel that society has done a lot of “stupid” things in the past and that doesn’t mean we should continue to do them, do you believe the demise of corporal punishment has reduced inconsiderate or offensive behaviour in society in the past 50 or so years? I have no cites, but I truly believe that the amount of inconsiderate behaviour in society has gone way up in the past 50 years.
Now, I’m quite prepared to say that correlation does not imply causation, but since CP was much more prevalent 50 years ago than it is now, advocates of getting rid of it should be able to point to specific beneficial behavioural results of that change by now. Not hypotheses, not “it MUST be better this way”, actual results.
As others have said, corporal punishment does not imply child abuse. A parent can “go off the deep end” and beat the crap out of their child - of course that should be (and is) illegal. But a smack on the butt is not a beating.
As I’m pretty sure I mentioned in another thread, I did get “the strap” from the school principal once when I was a kid. I found that much less humiliating than another incident where I was forced to go sit in a classroom of younger kids for part of a day (sorry - the details are lost in the mists of time, all I remember is that for doing something or other inappropriate I had to go sit in a class a few grades below mine).
I don’t think it’d work in the US, not nowadays. CP is legal in Korea, where I attended middle/high school, and while the system has its flaws I think it works more or less. That’s because of the culture, though - it’s been accepted for centuries as a part of the education system, and in many ways Korea is still stuck in the 19th century.
My personal view is that corporal punishment only works if it is strictly regulated. In middle school, I was slapped across the face and beaten with a mop handle for not getting good enough grades (I had just moved from the US and I barely spoke Korean - what did they expect?). That kind of punishment did nothing more than to make me miserable. Corporal punishment should never be used to punish poor grades and the instrument used should be specified. I know from first-hand experience that it’s too easy for it to get out of hand unless there are concrete rules governing what the teacher can and can’t do.
This is actually why I don’t support it. It’s too easy. Kid gets off with a sore bum and lots of sympathy from his peers. If he can “handle it” with enough aplomb, his social standing even increases.
Nor do I think detentions or suspensions do squat. Especially suspensions - they essentially reward kids who don’t want to be in class by making them not be in class. Where’s the logic here?
What I’d do, if I were Queen of the World, is assign community service and writing punishments. If a kid takes time away from other students by acting up, he should pay it back to them by cleaning their toilets, emptying the garbage bins in the lunchroom, or ladling them Beef Surprise in the cafeteria. If he’s not turning in his assignments, he should not only suffer a bad grade, but should be assigned extra writing assignments on the topic at hand. Handwritten, so his sore hand is the deterrent without anyone ever touching him.
Of course, the janitor and lunch lady unions wouldn’t put up with kids doing their workers’ jobs, and Mommy dearest would be screaming at the principal that it’s not fair that Jimmy has an extra paper on the pharaohs or fails. In those cases, I endorse corporal punishment…for the parents.
Maybe I was fortunate, but my daughter responded to time-out and grounding. Maybe my attitude would be different if she’d been a hellion, but I don’t see a lot of value in beating kids.
I’d be less against it, if I thought for one second that it would be applied fairly. But when there is corporal punishment, as a group, girls get hit less frequently and less severely than boys - for the same crime. Certain kids who are perceived as constant troublemakers are going to be whacked much more often than they deserve, and ones that are well liked by the teachers and staff aren’t.
This happens with all other punishments, too. To me, fairness in discipline is more important when you’re actually hitting children than it is when you’re making them stay in from recess.
I got paddled in junior high. Our teacher Mr. Brown had a big paddle, like a cricket bat, with the initials BBB emblazoned on it, for Brown’s Bun Bakery.
It hurt, but was a rite of passage. Those who never got it were the mice of the classroom.
) why should it be allowed on schoolchildren?