You’re just going to stretch it until it breaks. How can you compare basic table manners with a beating?
Corporal punishment is issuing a level of violence to a child. No, I don’t see that as a good thing. I don’t care what it is in response to.
Not to mention that the lessons we are speaking of are of two different methods.
1 - Son, it’s polite to eat with a knife and fork like mommy and daddy do.
2 - WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP.
You may find it surprising that a child who is beaten may “learn” that beating is okay, when he is being beaten.
More stretching. I’m not claiming that ever child who has been issued corporal punishment is going to turn out to be Genghis Khan, but you cannot deny the fact that when a child is beaten, he is being taught that is okay to beat. Especially when he thinks he is in the right.
My father taught me that I should defend myself. He never taught me, either outright or tacitly, that it is my right to raise my hand to someone to teach them a lesson.
Maybe I was unbelievably lucky, but my kids (now 14 & 18 year old) never did anything where I felt striking them was necessary. I’m glad, because I never woulda been able to do it.
But I didn’t compare table manners with corporal punishment. Instead, I took the form of your argument, substituted a bizarre example, and showed how your reasoning was faulty. For instance, I believe the jist of the debate between us proceeded as follows:
You claim corporal punishment implies kids grown up learning to hit other people.
I respond.
You refine, stating that you meant that kids will grow into adults who then smack their own kids. Clearly, you think that this is somehow wrong, and were using it as evidence of the immorality of corporal punishment (why else would you raise the point?)
I reply, substituting table manners for corporal punishment.
If I have misrepresented you, I apologise. Please put me straight.
However, the purpose of me using table manners was to demonstrate that your “evidence” is only convincing to somebody who already believes that corporal punishment is in someway bad.
But I can deny that, and I already have. I believe that even children are able to differentiate, on some level, between behaviours that are acceptable for parents to engage in, and those that are not.
You most certainly did compared the two, and in a most ignorant fashion in my view – or at least, yes, I think you are misrepresenting what I’m saying.
Parents teach their children by way of showing them, that table manners are a polite way to behave. The lesson is explicit. The aim is to teach a specific thing: table manners.
With corporal punishment, you may wish to teach you child that it is not okay to put the cat in the dryer, but there is an unintended lesson, that is driven home with every smack, that when someone is right, and someone is wrong, it is okay for the person who is right to hit the person that is wrong.
We’re talking about children here … not fully formed, fully rationalizing people. You claim that this phenomenon doesn’t exist because kids know better. That’s just wishful thinking.
The broaching of issuing intended lessons, like table manners, doesn’t remotely belong in this debate as we are discussing unintended lessons.
With respect, you’re changing your argument, and I’m rapidly boring of repeating the same thing over and over. No, there was no comparison between table manners and corporal punishment, rather, the form of your argument was what was under scrutiny. Here’s what you said, originally:
Later refined to (after I quibbled with the point you’re now trying to make for a second time in your latest post):
But why is this a bad thing? Why would you bring it up as supporting evidence that corporal punishment is bad? After all, the only people who would be convinced by this evidence are those whose minds are already convinced that smacking a child is immoral, as my post with the knives and forks was supposed to make clear (perhaps I should have used another example, I concede :))
Spanking, in most places in the U.S., is not illegal. A swat on the ass as consequence for certain behavior is not “beating” a kid. You’re equating 2 different things.
I did not change my argument. I only have one view on the issue.
But … we are at an impasse. You see nothing immoral in either hitting children to teach them a lesson, nor letting them know that when they are adults, it will be okay to hit their children to teach them a lesson.
Since you admit to deliberately misconstruing what I wrote, there is clearly no point in talking with you further. There can be no rational dialog with a person who does what you admit you did.
A) So, as a 8 year-old, I stick my finger in a light socket, and receive pain. What lesson do I learn from this? Specifically, what is the mechanism of learning in this case?
B) As a 12 year-old, I am careless with the direction I point a gun, and my father smacks me upside the head. (This is a good example someone gave, IMO.) What lesson do I learn from this? Specifically, what is the mechanism of learning in this case? In what important ways does it differ from the first case?
C) I am caught with a DUI for a second time, and am sent to jail. What lesson do I learn from this? Specifically, what is the mechanism of learning in this case? In what important ways does it differ from the second case?
(Note: those are meant to be rhetorical questions. Please think on them as you read the rest. I am not demanding a psychological or physicochemical account of learning!)
In (A), I think we would have unanimous agreement that, unless I am a scientist (j/k), I do not stick my fingers in light sockets again. Therefore I will leave this for a moment.
In (B), you would have me believe that my lesson is, “It’s ok to hit people.” That is, for instance, an assertion that a child has no sense of context; or perhaps it is a claim that a child has a very sensitive sense of context, only it is the same context all the time? What context, actually, would have to be present to “learn” the proposed lesson? – I mean, suppose in a society very similar to ours some people set out to teach a child this lesson: “It is ok to use force to get what you want.” How would their society differ from ours wrt teaching children? Am I to believe, “Not at all, as hitting a child is already a sufficient condition for teaching this lesson”? I think about how we teach children other things, and… well, I’m a little skeptical about this purported “lesson.”
In (C), why doesn’t the adult learn that it is ok to hold people against their will? Do adults stop learning? Do adults have a better sense of context? How does an adult gain a better sense of context if the child never had one to learn real lessons from in the first place? For example, when I ground my child, am I teaching my child it is ok to hold a person against their will? Why or why not?
I emphatically do not consider this as straightforward as you make it, at least in the general form you seem to present it.
Thank the Lord for this voluntary decision on your part, is all this devout atheist has to say. I was afraid you’d decide to expose your debating skills to me further.
For the record, though, what I admitted to was taking seriously EXACTLY what you’d claimed in your post–no taking it out of context, no misquoting, just your words, that were patently insincere and foolish, and which you promptly disowned because any literal and sensible interpretation of them would be indefensible. I’d be much happier if you’d chosen to defend those foolish words because in debate I would have crushed you like a bug, but you chose instead to run away from what you’d written and to blame your foolishness on me.
I’'m happiest of all, of course, that you’ve vowed never to engage in dialogue with me again, but if (I should say when) you choose to break your vow and respond to me, I would prefer you opened a Pit thread where I could express my feelings on the subject of your intellectual rigor and of your character less carefully than I must here.
Not relatable. The socket didn’t go out of its way to punish you. There is no pyschological bond between you and the socket.
I’m not even going to open the can of worms (he says with can-opener in hand) about how I feel about putting a gun in a child’s hand and then smacking him in the head. BUT … why hit? What’s wrong with making sure he’s not pointing the barrel where he shouldn’t (however the safest way it is to do that) and then giving him a stern talking to as to why he shouldn’t do that. Why not elevate the education? Why not take the gun away from him, sit him down, make him understand why he did something wrong and then give him another chance once your satisfied he understands.
Hitting him may be a quick way to get the point across, but there is still the unintended lesson that “hitting solves a problem.”
And not a problem of defense, but rather one where, as I said before, if you’re right, you can hit the person who is wrong. It may not be the object of the lesson, but it is there nonetheless.
Again, I don’t think its applicable to the debate. With a few exceptions, adults are not children. We have come together as a society and agreed that there are legal punishments for certain crimes. One would hope that an adult would learn his lesson, but that’s neither here nor there. By that point in life, we must assume that he is a rational person. He may not be, but at the very least he’s grown past the point where his brain is (or should be) fully formed.
If I fucked up a database that cost my company $20,000 dollars, I might expect to be fired. But if my boss walked into my cube and smacked me in the head, there would be some other issues to consider. Either my aformentioned notion of self-defense or a law-suit.
So by that token, why is it okay to hit kids when they do something wrong, but not adults. Afterall, you’re asserting that we adults are still capable of learning.
Occasionally, glee (and others), it is necessary to hit adults, teenagers, and animals.
Force can be used, like any other tool, for good or bad. It gets a bad reputation because people like Hitler and were so fond of using it.
Are the people in this thread who are totally against corporal punishment also extreme pacifists? I don’t see how you can accept that occasionally force is needed to impose your (our, society’s, whatever) will on someone or something else but claim that it is never necessary in the case of children. We use the force of the military and our economy to further our national interests in foreign countries; we use force to punish criminals and prevent them from committing more crimes; we use force to teach our dogs not to piss on the carpet.
And yet children are so tender, so precious and so terrifyingly fragile that using force to teach them a lesson is evil?
There is a lesson to be learned through force: you will have to answer to somebody (ultimately society) for your actions. And yes, part of that lesson is that force is occasionally necessary, but that it is powerful and should be used sparingly and for good.
Now, that said, I don’t think that it is necessary to hit children all that often. Mostly it is necessary when children are completely out of control and that is usually due to bad parenting already. If children are taught decently from the beginning, and force is kept to a minimum, I have no doubt that most children never need to be hit in their entire life. I’ve never hit my 2-year old and don’t see it ever being necessary. But I’m not going to say that it is never necessary for any child. And parents who do it aren’t necessarily bad.
I’m sorry, my point was not to focus on specific examples. You may pick any examples you like. I chose a few to try to illustrate my main questions, which I will repeat here devoid of that context:
I feel that the lesson “it’s ok to hit people [that are wrong]” is actually a remarkably subtle lesson in the face of the immediate context of the events that precipitated the punishment in the first place. What I mean is: if the child is capable of selecting this remarkably abstract “lesson”, then surely the child is capable of learning the intended lesson; in which case we have demonstrated that, indeed, the adult successfully taught the child the lesson. But it actually goes further, because there was this additional lesson, the lesson about using force when one is right. This lesson is abstract in two ways. One: it is part of the context of human relationships in general; and, two, there is no actual reinforcement of this lesson by words, explanations, demonstrations, etc. For instance, why isn’t the child learning, “It’s ok for a parent to hit a child when the parent is right”? Why is the lesson even more abstract when you frame it? Why isn’t it less abstract?
I continue with this line of questioning, attempting to drive home the “context” issue:
In other words, when we set out to instruct a child in some way, there are attendant behaviors (tone, words, motions, etc); thus I want us to consider, purely hypothetically, how we would instill the lesson directly, that is, not in the abstract way just considered, but where there could be no confusion with some other context. (After all, this is normally how we try to teach children!) And I am incredulous that, in fact, what is at discussion in this thread is just how we would go about doing that… that corporal punishment for anything as such is sufficient for teaching the abstract lesson.
I agree. But apparently children are capable of rather amazing feats of abstraction. (Actually this I don’t doubt. But I also think children are capable of understanding a remarkable number of contexts. It is on this latter part we seem to disagree.)
But that skips over the whole thread! First, it is ok to hold a person against their will, when we are right. It’s the entire basis of the justice system! When a person resists the law, they can be hurt. It’s the entire basis of executive power. They have a context. So does corporal punishment. Therefore the onus is to describe how a child cannot distinguish context so that it learns faulty lessons from corporal punishment, yet somehow can be capable of remarkable abstractions to learn the unintended lesson, and still be able to learn from contexts that are normally associated with direct learning, including contexts where the lessons you decry are necessary to function in society.
Plus force is not the same as violence. I have no problem with restraining my toddler forcefully, or forcibly holding her still while admonishing her. I do not consider this to be violence.
And I’ve never had to use violence (or even force) to house-train a puppy, either. Repetition and reward work just as well.
Again. There are a lot of apples and oranges here. A child generally does not understand when he has done something bad. I’m talking things like your toddler scribbles on the wall with a crayon or something like that. Or even if he pitches a scream-fit tantrum on you. He hasn’t drawn up a doctrine and presented a Final Solution at Wansee. He’s just a kid. He doesn’t know. How does “force for good” really do good there? Or rather, how would an alternative to “force for good” be worse?
I’m not going to argue the rest of your points, because they pre-suppose your aformentioned “force for good” notion, however I really wanted to point out the deliciousl irony in this statement:
It seems that in order to make bad parents into good parents, they should hit their kids.
I would like to clarify this point, or emphasize it. In order for the child to learn that secondary lesson, the child must have already learned the intended lesson, namely, that the adult was right; or, if you prefer, that some behavior is what the adult wants (force gets you what you want); or, whatever other inflammatory phrasing is used.
Nay, for me. Children have to learn that their actions have consequences; that doesn’t have to be in the form of their parents deliberately inflicting pain on them.
At least, that’s what I believe in principle. In practical terms, I know that being beaten never did anything for me except destroy any respect I had for authority figures.
I also understand the pleasure involved in brutalizing somebody weaker, just because you can; I think we all have that potential inside us.