Is hugging a student really and literally a no-no under the literal policies and laws (e.g. there is a “no touching at all” rule or similar), or is hugging a student a no-no primarily because of the potential ick factor, a very likely subsequent investigation for child molestation, and a general refusal of school districts to hire people who have been investigated for a sex crime, even if not convicted (i.e. it’s not actually against policy, but good luck keeping your job if you do that)?
Got a cite for that last part?
I’m always troubled by the failure of the government to treat 18 year-olds as adults. When my kids were 18, I refused to sign school forms for them, and had them do it. The school didn’t like it. I said, “they’re 18, they don’t even have to have parents anymore.”
A teacher should have no more right to hit an 18 year-old student than the 18 year-old student has a right to hit a teacher.
and if they hit my child, at any age, there would be a lawsuit.
I turned 18 while a high school senior. I was able to sign my own school forms, but only if one of my parents first signed a form saying that was OK. That irked me at the time, but my mom signed the form for me, so I didn’t make a big deal of it. The school didn’t have corporal punishment though, so at least that didn’t come up.
Doesn’t Texas have a “stand your ground” law? What if an 18 year old student responds to a beating by murdering the teacher? That would really pit two insane laws against each other.
If they’d tried to spank me in school at 18, I would have spanked them back. Good for the goose, good for the gander.
Actually if they’d tried it an any age, I would have hit back. It’s a parent’s job, not the school’s.
It’s a parent’s job to beat a child with a board?
(When “spanking” in schools is talked about, it’s not a light smack, keep your hand away from the hot stove kind of thing. The kind of thing people always rush to defend in discussions about spanking. It’s beating the child (edit: or I guess not a child necessarily) with a board, often to the point of causing welts and bruises.)
As Martin Hyde pointed out, this isn’t true. Parents aren’t with a child at school. The teachers and administrators are empowered to act with the authority and responsibility of parents during these times.
This is non-controversial at least as far as the law goes. I wish this thread hadn’t turned into a debate on child corporal punishment as we have done it before. The idea of corporal punishment for adults seems to have no support in our history.
The consent argument seems plausible at first blush (the idea that an 18 year old enrolling in school consents to school rules and punishments associated with it) and also putting aside that this 18 year old withdrew her consent, I cannot imagine a scenario where the government can confer a benefit on the condition that a citizen consents to battery.
Want to mail something at the post office? Okay, but if it exceeds the proper weight limit, you consent to a caning by a postal employee. Seems silly, right?
My high school didn’t paddle. My elementary school did, but only as part of a behavior plan for a difficult child. There had to be a signed consent from the parents on file, and then the parents still had to be called and notified of a specific incident.
My high school did, however, treat 18- (and the occasional 19-) year-olds as though they were underage. The idea is that having one set of rules for some students, and another set for others won’t work, especially since the people enforcing the rules can’t tell a student’s age at a glance. I suppose if the school paddled, they would have had to rethink that paradigm.
Well it depends to be honest. I was born in the 50s and paddling was widespread throughout my childhood, but that was the extent of it. Misbehave and up through early Junior High you were summarily told to assume the position on the (almost always female) teacher’s desk and she spanked your ass with a paddle. I still remember my fifth grade teacher, ancient as a gnarled oak, thin as a rail, and by god the biggest guy in class didn’t lightly cross her, she could wield a paddle with the strength of a Titan.
In Junior High and on, it kind of changed and instead a Vice Principal assumed responsibility for corporal discipline, and it was done in his office.
In all that time, and I was a genuinely-shit headed kid until about 9th grade for various reasons, meaning I got paddled plenty, I never once bled or had serious injuries from it. Done the way it was then at least, paddling hurt, but it didn’t cause harm like what was described in the article.
My parents and grandparents used to describe a far harsher school regime. They said that in their day teachers would slap you in the face if you spoke out of turn, slam a book into the back of your head, or beat you with a yardstick til you sobbed like a baby.
Like jtgain I’m not super interested in the corporal punishment debate. I’ll just say that in general schools reflect the corporate punishment values of the societies in which they live. In my dad’s day if he misbehaved say, in a store, the store owner would thump him and send him home, and when my grandpa heard about it he’d thump him twice as bad. In my generation generally only teachers (who act in loco parentis) would whip kids other than the kid’s parents or close relatives. And my dad probably would have beat someone half to death if say, a shopkeeper slapped one of his kids…but in his day he would’ve expected it from any adult who saw him misbehave, and his parents would have only been grateful that a nearby adult had corrected his bad behavior in the appropriate way.
I’ve always felt my generation was transitioning from a period in which kids were essentially beaten in a way we’d recognize as domestic violence today, to one in which kids aren’t spanked at all. The more regimented and less violent paddling was kind of the transitional practice.
As parents stopped being so accepting of corporal punishment, schools largely stopped doing it. It’s really fairly unheard of in the United States, most people actually don’t even know it still goes on. The last report I read about it showed that in the States that still do it, something like fewer than 10% of school districts practice it. Typically these are more rural districts of Southern States, and thus probably why most people I know are unaware it even goes on.
Like my friend GusNSpot, I went to Catholic School starting in the late fifties. Corporal punishment was the norm, but it tapered off by high school.
As a parent, there is no way I would have tolerated a teacher physically punishing my daughters. Had one of my daughters been paddled as describe in the link from Lord Felton’s post, an assault charge would have been the absolute best the teacher would have received. This would have taken all of the self discipline I could gather to let it go at that.
Well in the school districts that still do paddling, you have to sign a consent form. I believe in the ones that still do it, you either sign such a form or your kid doesn’t go to the school. “As described in the link”, would seem to go beyond normal paddling.
But the real distinguishing factor to me is 18 years old. At 18, it’s really not even the parent’s call, the child should be the one who decides–okay, I’ll let them paddle me because that’s the crazy rules here in this Texas charter school, or no I won’t do it. She said no, and they physically restrained her and paddled her anyway.
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I wonder what school officials do when they encounter a kid who has developed a spanking fetish and appears to be enjoying their “punishment.”
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How many teachers/administrators/etc. who regularly administer CP suddenly found their homes burnt to the ground?
Is there any precedent for corporal punishment of adults in the US or the greater Western world? Was it ever permitted for university professors to paddle college or grad students? It is certainly not permitted today, but what about 1750? Did they paddle at Oxford in 1430?
The whipping of slaves, being pilloried in the stocks…maybe others.
Corporal punishment (and I mean flogging that leaves scars) was essentially universal in the military for most of human history. It was tapering off in the 19th century but it was well known as a punishment in the British Navy of the period.
The scold’s bridle being another example, mostly used on women to silence them.
Plenty. Delaware didn’t abolish judicial corporal punishment until 1972 (and last used it in 1952). Regarding Oxfor,d they didn’t use corporal punishment at Oxford in 1430. It was first allowed in Cambridge in 1440 and Oxford in 1480. It was part of a general Europeanwide educational movement to increase the quality and professionalism of Universities, which had had a reputation of being fairly rowdy places. The University of Paris and some in Germany started legalizing corporal punishment at around the same time.
That part is discussed in the decision:
Something about that site rather makes me question what intent it is published with.
I am curious about the following: What would happen if a child at that school hit the person administering the punishment or the people holding her down?
Are children who hit their parents when their parents are administering corporal punishment committing assault/battery?
What would happen if this 18 year old had hit the principal?