Isn’t it usually? I’ve never been in a class where it took place, but I’ve always imagined it happening center stage in front of the others.
I think that quite often only the dean/principal/etc. is tasked with doling out punishment. A teacher might take a student to the principal’s office, go in and lay out her case, then go back and teach. The student then goes in, has a chance to give his side, and then is either paddled, pardoned, or meted out some other punishment as the principal feels is justified. Obviously, this sort of checks and balances is going to naturally veer towards the teacher’s favor, but it does mean that a central authority is overseeing the process and can keep track as incidences with a student occur more or less often, with optional alternate strategies formed at need. I also means that kindly teachers don’t have to try and be fierce to be respected. Only the principal needs to appear strong for everyone to behave properly before their teachers.
If a teacher is to do something himself, I think it would usually be something like making the student stand in the corner or sit in the front row of seats.
It may not be your goal. But I strongly suspect it will be the goal of many of the teachers who take advantage of the permission to hit children. I do recall my time in school, and there were entirely too many teachers who were basically grown up bullies.
Yeah, sure. Kids never lose their temper or are short sighted; it’s a masochistic plot to arrange their own punishment. :rolleyes:
And I would certainly expect that one of the more common targets for such beatings by teachers will be kids who fight back or tattle on bullies. After all, the bullies are doing what they are “supposed” to do, what the teachers themselves are doing; I would fully expect a teacher willing to hit his students to take the side of the bullies, every time. It was always my experience that teachers preferred that the discipline problem of bullying be “solved” by the victim just cowering and taking it without complaint; I see no reason not to think that teachers actively beating students themselves won’t be worse.
Oh, please. They do better simply because they can take the kids already likely to do well.
And I do find it interesting that you use the phrase keep the kids “in their place”; that’s exactly the phrase used by one of my high school PE teachers when he was encouraging the big kids to bully the little kids, to “keep them in their place”. I bet he would have loved permission to personally lay hands on us.
Except that it in your world view, frowning at a person is already on the edge of psychopathic axe murderers. Your world view does not conform to most people’s.
We do not all have a secret desire to be mean and nasty to each other. We do not all have a secret desire to rob our fellow man blind. There aren’t conspiracies against the general populace, against school children, nor anything. People do their job to the best of their ability and within the parameters of reason.
There will always be the 1% who are assholes and abuse their position. Whether it is better to focus on identifying and removing the assholes, or better to lay down full bans on specific behaviors to nullify the assholes depends on the relative cost and reward of the two strategies. You are unlikely to ever find a perfect solution.
Eliminate the laws stopping people from doing so or the cops enforcing them, and you’ll see otherwise. That’s why laws exist. All people? No. A great many? Yes. Malice and brutality are not rare qualities.
If you give teachers permission to hit children, many will abuse it.
While I don’t think corporal punishment when applied with regard to the rules can be equated with bullying, either in principle or degree, I have to go with Der Trihs on one thing: It will be misused and abused. I’ve seen it. I went to some truly fucked-up high schools in my time, and I saw it there. I also saw it in the Korean hakwon where I taught, where I came close to beating one particularly abusive piece of shit teacher to within an inch of his life after he smacked an elementary school student in my class. Had I stayed the whole term, I might well have done so, and I’d be doing time right now.
Which brings me to the main reason I have a problem with corporal punishment, namely have you seen these high school students recently? What’s to stop one of them from turning around, taking the paddle, and shoving it up the teacher’s small intestine right in front of the rest of the class? And more to the point, would he be wrong? Would he really be wrong? Part of the schools’ function is to prepare students for the real world. Well in the real world, it would be considered self-defense, as far as I’m concerned. I understand the concept of in loco parentis in schools, and I agree with disciplinary punishment, but when a teacher gets physical with a student, that crosses an interesting threshold as far as I’m concerned.
As much as he’d be morally right to shove the paddle up his principal’s ass, in the real world he’d be charged with assaulting a federal employee.
In the real world that children/students will be entering, a federal employee would not be allowed to physically punish a member of staff.
Students aren’t the employees of their teachers.
They are still in a position of subservience.
The problem with teachers paddling their charges for misbehaviour is, some teachers will not hit as hard as others. Maybe we need to design a machine that can give out a standard paddling?
We can have dials on the side of the machine, too, so that teachers can tell the machine what the punishment is for, the age and size of the “child,” etc.
Let’s call up the makers of the Sybian to design it. Those guys don’t fuck around.
And he’d plead self defense. And he could probably make a civil rights issue of being relegated to a special category of citizen whom it is permissible to beat.
Well this theory is often touted but has no basis in reality.
In British schools violence has sky rocketed since corporal punishment has been banned.
Both against other children and against teachers.
The level of violence has also risen with knife crime and even murders occurring
, something that was practically unheard of during my school years.
I, myself received CP in primary school(the slipper) and my friends, we also received the cane for more serious offences in secondary school.
Not once did we EVER consider it a licence or a rationale to use violence or bullying on other kids and we went on to adult life as normal well adjusted adults,not alcoholic wife beaters.
And I never met anyone who did.
I did however see some budding bullies dramatically and seemingly permamently stop their anti social tactics after receiving C.P.
Obviously it didn’t end bullying all together, what tended to happen was incorrigible bullies restricted their activities to out of school time in areas where they were unlikely to be caught by adults, and the victim was unlikely to "tell on "them.
I find it ironic that the champions of so called childrens rights, and anti so called “child beating” ,
(nice emotive ,not to say perjorative,use of words,it makes the teacher sound like a sexual pervert or an out of control alcoholic, abusive father)
have over the years been the cause of so much emotional and physical misery to so many children,by their well meant but completely misguided theories.
They have by their efforts caused as much harm to kids as died in the wool child abusers.
I agree that he’d have a good self defense case. The point is I think it’s rather ridiculous that a teacher can spank another adult.
We had corporal punishment at school until Grade 9 or so (age 13) - it never stopped me from not doing homework or making a noise in class. Hell, once, my entire class was sent for caning for getting rowdy when teacher was out of classroom. Didn’t change our behaviour much.
I’d much rather have gotten a caning than a detention when I was at school.
Except that every study I’ve heard of confirms that “corporal punishment” increases violence, not decreases it.
That’s what it is, like it or not. And your alternative of “corporal punishment” is hardly a model of honesty and objectivity; it’s clearly a term designed to sound all nice and sanitized. Like “enhanced interrogation.”
This. I entered secondary school (sixth year to tenth in our country) at the age of 9 instead of the more usual 12. This is a country where it was not considered important to keep kids with their age cohorts, but rather with their academic peers, so skipping grades and repeating years was common.
The worst thing that happened to me was that “the cane” was banned after my first year. Pretty much this meant open season on bullying of 9-10 year olds by 16 and 17 year olds. The immediate punishment that the bullies feared was corporal punishment. The alternatives, primarily suspension and detention, were hardly disincentives. Most of the bullies weren’t interested in sitting in class for six hours a day anyway. By the time they got enough “demerits” to get expelled, they could put you in the hospital ten times. Of course you were smart enough to figure this out and stopped telling on them after the third time.
I was never afraid of the cane, nor were any of the other kids who were being bullied. When the CP regime was in force, only kids who misbehaved very badly got caned. The 14-17 year olds who were into bullying were afraid of the cane.
Ironically the same social science geniouses (parents and “educators”) who were most opposed to the cane, were most in favor of due process, giving “second” chances and not “stigmatizing” offenders.
And this was at a “good” private school. The situation in the government schools was much worse even, after the cane was banned. Mixed gender secondary schools pretty much became unmanageable.
Your boss can fire you. If you don’t want to live on the street for the rest of your life, at some point you have to shape up. Starvation is the corporal punishment of adult life.
Kids on the other hand will never starve. They are expected to be put through the whole length of school regardless of anything so though might be kicked out of one school, that simply lands them in another. If they aren’t, they sit around their parents house until their parents frighten them into good behavior or kick them out, at which point the starvation principle starts working.
No matter what, corporal punishment comes into effect at some point. The only question is how organized it is.
Which is not the same as beating you. In fact, if your boss tries you can punch him right back; self defense. Which of course is the real attraction of “corporal punishment” in school; targets too small to fight back. Rather like the attraction of wife beating; if hitting kids is such a great idea, perhaps you think that should be made legal again too? After all, if beating people is so good for them like some posters are claiming, logically we are actually abusing women by not beating them.
And if you do think it’s wrong to hit your wife, why is it right to hit kids?
There’s no real logical consistency to the pro-hitting side of the argument, except the desire to find an excuse to hit people.