Somewhere in there, there’s an argument that goes “teachers have to be able to assign actual consequences to students”. The problem is that there aren’t very many consequences that students care about anymore: Grades? With a 50% graduation rate as you’ve said above, that’s obviously not on anyone’s priority list. Detention? Fine, but what if I don’t show up? Suspension? Somehow getting out of the classroom is a punishment now?
When I was in high school, the only people who could be adequately punished fell into three categories: kids who cared about graduating well enough to go to college, kids who were on the various sports/activity teams (and could be kicked off for bad behavior), and kids whose parents enforced the negative consequences of bad behavior reported by teachers. Any kid who did not meet one of those three things simply was not able to be disciplined in any reasonable way, because the teachers have so few tools to make the kids care.
In my relatively rural high school, actually, the biggest single motivator was grades: but that was because a lot of kids had the idea that they wanted a career in SOMETHING, and the local Vo-Tech we partnered with would happily boot a kid for bad behavior at the home high school. So you’d see the rough and tumble poor kids staying good for the sake of those auto mechanic course hours. I suspect the lower graduation rates are from places where kids do not have that tie between their school performance and their future career.
The reason I suspect corporal punishment keeps coming up in these discussions is that it’s a method by which teachers can, in the absence of other methods, inflict actual consequences on a kid. This is not meant to be an endorsement of corporal punishment in schools, natch.
Further thoughts: teacher authority is only further eroded by zero-tolerance polices (takes away judgement, and the policy can require really stupid calls that serve to increase kids’ contempt of the rulemakers) and by the plethora of lawsuits or threats of lawsuits every time a teacher has to physically restrain a student (since that takes things up one step–not only can students not be effectively punished, but it’s hard and time-consuming to even effectively stop bad behavior).
Again: in my high school, no one batted an eye if a kid started acting out physically and a teacher held them down or shook them to stop the offending behavior–or, if needed, physically dragged them to the dean/vice principal. That alone could be an effective step that didn’t require the re-introduction of full-on capital punishment.
I think you’ve laid out the ‘rational’ argument for corporal punishment there. But I don’t believe there’s a case where it’s worked to motivate a child to get better grades. It probably keeps them from disrupting others, but so would removing them from the classroom.
I concur–the only rational use of anything even resembling corporal punishment is, IMHO, removing the disruptive child from the classroom quickly and efficiently. The issue becomes “how to motivate chronically disruptive children to pay attention”…and I’ve laid out one idea, which is to make vocational training more available and tie its availability to behavior in normal school time. Of course, that leads to the next step of “connecting vo-tech to real-world success”, but that’s at least easier with practical arts than it is with more abstract college degrees that most at-risk kids won’t aspire to anyway.
See, now that’s brilliant. Heck, combine it with my idea and have a sort of paid apprenticeship for vocational schools and you’ve got a honey of a plan.
