Corporal punishment in schools?

Great Debates
1

So I was sitting there at Wataburger the other day, and I was listening in on this conversation being help by four men that obviously worked together. Three of them were older, and the fourth was probably in his early to mid twenties. They were talking abou “kids these days,” and went off on how when they were in school, if you acted up, “We used to get the paddle,” “Well, we used to get the switch,” and “We got a long leather strap,” and all of them were thinking the same damn thing:

Kids were much more well behaved in school when teachers were allowed to do this sort of thing.

I know from first hand experience how horrific kids can be in a school-type setting, and with a couple of current news stories (one involving two teen males and a teen girl engaging in oral sex in the classroom in New Orleans, and another about five fourth grade boys doing the same here in Texas), plus all the other stories of kids gone wrong, it makes me wonder:

Would kids be more well behaved nowadays if teachers were still allowed to paddle unruley students in class? There was a King of the Hill episode that addressed this, and there it seemed to work. Of course, that’s fiction, so I’m curious as to what real people would think.

2

I do not think corporal punnishment in schools is ever a good idea: the potential for abuse, and the long-term damage such abuse can infliict is just too great.

However, we do need to come up with some sort of effective punnishment for schools: I don’t think the only options are either corporal punnishment or the system we have now.

At least in my area, the pinnacle of the day-to-day disciplinesystem is “in-school suspension” (ISS). This works as follows: instead of going to the regular classroom, the child spends the day in a special classroom and has their work sent to them. This is the “big bad punnishment”–this is what happens whenever a teacher refers a kid. The problems with this are legion:

  1. Most kids don’t mind ISS. In fact, kids with moderate to severe behavoir problems often prefer it, as the very low level of outside stimulation comes as a relief. I’ve had kids cheer when given ISS.

  2. It takes the kids who need direct instruction the most out of the classroom. Now, not all academically challenged kids are behavior problems and vice-versa, but there is a coorelation between the two.

  3. As a combination of the above points, a fringe benefit of ISS is that it usually means you don’t have any homework: it’s a lot easier to get through all your assignments when you can just work off a list and if you don’t understand something you just guess and go on, you don’t have to spend time being taught how to do it in the first place, nor can you ask for help if there are problems.

  4. This is not an intrinsic flaw in the system, but ISS rooms are often staffed by the worst sorts of people: in schools where I have worked I have seen ISS rooms where the kids are allowed to sleep, to go to the snack machenes during class, to take long bathroom breaks, etc.

  5. ISS is way over used–For the principal, it’s the only punnishment short of suspension/expulsion, and so it loses any social stigma that might have worked as a check on behavior.

  6. Because ISS is the only thing principals ever do, and because no one minds ISS, I have had students deliberatly push me to give them ISS: if I, as their teacher, assigned extra work or after school detentions as punishment they would refuse to do them, knowing that my only option in the face of bald refusal was to send them to the principal, who in turn assigned ISS.

To sum up, school disciplinesystems as they now stand are ineffective, and counterproductive and function mostly to create a paper trail so that you can get rid of the very bad kids by sending them to alternitive school. (and, frankly, to give teachers a break from the very bad kids) It never offers any incentive for the very bad kid to change his behavior. However, the fact that ISS sucks dosen’t mean that corporal punnishment is ok: I don’t want anyone but me hitting my kids. These are some ther alternatives I have considered, which all have their problems:

  1. After school detention/Saterday school. The problems with this is that it can be hard to enforce. Some kids don’t have rides: some kids have one parent who works a couple jobs, and they never see the kid at all. There is enough of that that all the other kids can lie and say there is no way for them to get a ride. I have this vision in my mind of some newspaper publishing a story about how some kid had to walk five miles home from school because a teacher gave him an after school detention for some petty thing. In some cases, phone calls home to confirm the detention can make those “I don’t have a ride” issues magically disapper. In other cases, it is impossible to get ahold of a parent. however, failure to show up for after schhol detention/saturday school should never be answered with ISS the way it now stands: I see this all the time ,and to the kids it looks like “if you don’t do the thing that sucks, they will downgrade your punnishment.”

  2. Just phone calls home. These can work great if the child has the right kind of parents: on the other hand, some kids are so out of control that the parents can’t affect them either, and other parents are so apathetic that they don’t care.

  3. Keep ISS the way it is, but add some sort of work component. This is actually my favorite: I think kids in ISS should have to spend half the day cleaning the bathrooms, picking up trash around campus, mopping the lunchroom, detailing my car (ok the last is a joke). Frankly, I’m not sure why this can’t be done, but I have been toldhtey can’t by principals. If anyone knows the reason, I’d love to hear it.

  4. Suspension from extracurricular activities. This is not done nearly enough. It dosen’t apply to all kids, of course, but I think that a kid who has been in ISS should not be allowed to attend football practice that afternoon, and then get whatever punnishment the coach hands out for missing practice: lkids who don’t give a flying shit abouttheir parents or teachers care what their coaches think of them.

All in all, I think that teachers and especailly principals need more options for disciplining kids: different kids have different buttons, and the punnishments assigned need to reflect that. Anything would be better than one-size-fits-all, kinda-boring-but-no-big-deal ISS as it stands today.

3

Yeah, but isn’t “King of the Hill” sort of tongue-in-cheek humor?

Anyway, I think schools need to have consequences for bad behavior, but why does it need to be physically striking the children? Surely they can come up with better than that. I used to do some substitute teaching, and man was that ever tough. The problem was that in many of the schools where I was teaching, I didn’t receive any support from the administration. The only method of discipline I had was to send the bad kids to the office. Unfortunately, most of the time they would just send the kids back to class. It’s not much of a deterrent to acting up if the only thing that’s going to happen to you is you go sit in the office for 20 minutes and then come right back. I actually had this one genius call my classroom ON THE INTERCOM and inform me that the office would not be taking any more student referrals from my class. They might as well have said “Hey kids, feel free to do anything you feel like and nothing will happen to you”. So what’s wrong with detention/suspension/expulsion as a means of discipline? You can’t really say it’s not working if the school isn’t even enforcing it (or ineffectively enforcing it, as described in the previous post). I don’t teach anymore, but if I did, I sure wouldn’t have any desire to hit someone else’s child.

And here’s my second point - when did this magic time exist when kids didn’t misbehave in school? How old were the guys in the burger joint who were discussing it? You said one was in his 20’s - well, I doubt they even HAD corporal punishment when he was in school, so how would he know? I’m close to 40, and let me tell you, the kids were no angels when I was in school.

4

I really dislike the idea of corporal punishment in schools. Consequences should be provided, and severity should exist in direct proportion to the activity, but humiliating a student by paddling them in front of class or even privately in a principal’s office (and who isn’t going to know about it?) will only make an enemy out of a student instead of changing their behavior.

What we’re looking at is a fundamental paradox within our own cultural values about education. We believe, as a country, that all children should be educated. That means that all children have a right - even an obligation - to attend school. The consequences are that we have a large population of students who don’t want to be there and will do what’s necessary to get out of there as well as a system that makes it very, very difficult to get rid of destructive students.

Most schools have at least dropped the out-of-school suspension because it was a reward to students. Break a bunch of rules and disrupt thirty other students’ learning, well, okay, you can have three days away from the place you hate so much.

In school suspension is effective if it’s set up correctly. Mounds of work, precious few breaks, no socializing time, and a very grim teacher/administrator glaring at you the whole time. However, I think it should be used a lot more sparingly. I would be tons more interested in seeing students sweat off their rule breaking by having to do boring, difficult chores like picking up trash on campus, cleaning bathrooms, dusting the library, and such. Of course, it would take some pretty stiff oversight and a whole bunch of parents would scream.

Saturday school works well in my district because:

a) students and parents have the requirements spelled out to them at the beginning of the year. They must sign an acknowledgement form.

b) the town is small enough that nearly all students can walk or bike to school.

c) no one wants to give up three hours of their Saturday school.

d) missing Saturday school means you get two more as well as . . .

e) three Saturday schools mean that the parents is summoned to appear before a judge to explain why they have failed to change their child’s behavior. Parents tend to get really motivated when they’re looking at a court summons.

5

to add to Manda’s excellent post, (and a small comment on the OP - saying ‘it seemed to work on this show’, when you’re talking not just about a sit com, but a cartoon at that - sheesh!)

as a (mumble mumble) forty seven year old, let me tell you about corporal punishment in the school

OUr science teacher would take large pieces of tape, stick it to the heads of the ‘unruly’ boys and pull it out. He’d throw blackboard erasers at people talking in class (his aim wasn’t good). One day a pal of mine did a ‘joke’ by half pulling my chair out as I was sitting down, didn’t do anything to me really, just a kind of ‘gotcha’. The teacher saw it, came rushing down the aisle and viciously yanked Dave’s chair out from under him, sending him sprawling to the ground, of course, the chair came w/in inches of hitting me.

yep, it sure was fine.

I’m a big fan of the sorts of punishments Manda spoke about, I remember insisting to the school that my son get consequences when he was playing around and broke a hall clock (I suggested helping the janitor for a few days, given that he’d given the guy some extra work).

6

Being a product of the “beat 'em into submission” education system, all I can say is that if any teacher tried to do to my son what some of my teachers did to us kids, well, the lawsuit that followed may just be the least of their problems.

Nope. I’ve never hit my son, and I’ll be damned if anyone else will.

7

If you’re talking about the “Paddlin’ Peggy” episode, you might want to note-in the end, corporal punishment was discouraged.

The episode spoke out against it, not for it.

8

I am a teacher.

35 years ago, when I was a pupil, we had corporal punishment at my school. It was usually the same few boys who regularly got it. (Makes you wonder how effective it was).
We were also called by our surnames throughout our time there and were not even allowed to talk in the corridors (!).
Some teachers would throw the wooden chalk duster at a pupil. Occasionally it hit the wrong kid. We did not complain, because we saw the staff as the all-powerful opposition. We didn’t tell our parents about abuses, because the Headmaster was an authority figure. For the same reason, our parents did not visit the school to complain about anything.
I remember summoning up the courage to ask a teacher to help a friend of mine who was being bullied by a gang. His response was ‘tell him to be a man and stand up for himself.’

Fortunately the UK stopped corporal punishment decades ago.
I use the unpleasant experiences above to help me support my pupils. My School has an anti-bullying code, but this only works if the kids feel able to tell a teacher.

I can assure you that a teenager is extremely unlikely to confide in a teacher who hits pupils.

9

Those interested in an alternative to corporal punishment, or the overuse of ISS, may wish to check out PBIS…a comprehensive approach to school discipline.

Also…check out Peacebuilders for related topics.