What schools are these? Corporal punishment was not used in any of my schools, and we were reasonably well behaved kids. My mother has been a schoolteacher for 35 years and has never struck a student once in all that time, and yet her classes are extremely well behaved. My young cousins attend schools that do not permit corporal punishment and yhet they are quite well behaved and I do not believe their schools are out of control.
A teacher who must use physical punishment to keep his/her students in line is obviously an incompetent dolt.
Who ever said that we couldn’t punish the kids? I’ve never understood the “either we hit the kids or don’t do anything at all” mindset. The school in my town hasn’t allowed paddling for at least thirty years. Amazingly, the majority of the kids still learned to respect authority.
Who ever said that we couldn’t punish the kids? I’ve never understood the “either we hit the kids or don’t do anything at all” mindset. The school in my town hasn’t allowed paddling for at least thirty years. Amazingly, the majority of the kids still learned to respect authority and got an education in the process.
Also, I really doubt that there’s anything special about some “urban” kids that makes them unable to respond to anything other than physical punishment.
I agree. If this were th case, then it should be stopped. I don’t think that the teachers are getting any joy out of the punishment. Sometimes, telling a kid to “put his nose in the corner” ot something doesn’t make the impression that a couple of licks with a paddle does.
You’re embarassed. It stings. The next time that you think: “I’m going to punch Jimmy in the nose!” You also think: “wait, that got me spanked last time. Maybe I won’t do that again.”
I don’t know what some of you are imagining, but paddling is not “beating.” The intention is not to incapacitate or injure. It stings a little, but probably doesn’t leave a bruise.
My school (in the UK) doesn’t use physical punishment. It sends the wrong message (that the bigger person is in the right) and there are plenty of proven alternatives.
In addition, if you need to hit children 30,000 times a year, is the violence working?
“Kids in urban areas” is a sloppy generalization. My daughter and her friends were always urban kids and they “tended to act” with respect for their education and their parents. In fact, we once had the pleasure of following up on a snooty phone call from a resident of the rather toney neighborhood where the high school happened to be located about the kids “loitering” on the corner every afternoon. We were happy to report back that they were waiting for the bus to take them downtown to a local college for their afternoon classes.
Teaching kids to hit for the reasons stated is not appropriate. This practice has no bearing on self defense. I would be all over that school if I were a parent. I expected my child to be educated at school not hit. If there was any cause for anyone to think my child needed discipline I was always just a phone call away. No, this doesn’t wash for me. This school may have had a problem to address but they went down the low road to solve it.
I think that there is one strong endorsement for paddling and that is that it is immediate while many other forms of punishment such as detention are not and that immediacy has a stronger effect on behavior than other punishments that are administered hours, days, or weeks, later. I went to graduate school in psychology and I always found it odd that people shunned that effect when it came to humans.
Not really wanting to get into the argument, but this doesn’t make any sense. What you’re asking is, if it becomes necessary to apply a disciplinary measure once to about one quarter of the schoolkid population, is discipline working. That’s completely outside of the discussion of whether paddling is violence or not. I’d guess that any school system resorts to fairly serious disciplinary measures for that proportion of their kids during a schoolyear. I do think some of these reasons are way out of line even for discipline of any kind.
They did (or still do) have paddlings in Georgia. When I was in primary school, it was an “opt-out” program. My mother opted me out, but most people didn’t. The paddlings? Completely ineffectual. Didn’t hurt at all, the kids all laughed about it.
I’m asking if a violent disciplinary measure, which is applied **every year ** to about a quarter of the School population, is working. Apart from anything else, it clearly isn’t a deterrent.
Is anyone suggesting paddling is non-violent?
What would you consider the equivalent of paddling? An essay? Detention?
Yeah, that must be why I behaved so wildly in school and why my schools were always riddled with violence. Oh wait. There was no paddling and everything turned out fine. I always get those two things confused.
What we have here is the classic split in what ‘paddling’ is for. What the purpose is.
glee doubts that it is working because it has to be used so often. This seems to indicate that some sort of corrective is accomplished from paddling or that a fear of paddling would keep the kids in line.
But here in the States some people feel that this sort of thing, and indeed prison as well, is simply to punish the criminal. To cause them pain and to somehow give pleasure to the wronged person. Yes, I have seen teachers make one kid, the wronged party, paddle another.
So glee, it is working. I’m sure the teachers handing out the punishment feel great after wacking those bad kids. They have no intention of trying to change their behavior with paddling. It is just to cause pain in bad kid and relive their stress.
I don’t believe that there is any set metrics or convention for disciplinary action for a child. All children are unique and respond differently to various sorts of discipline. For one, it may be a stern talking to, another, the revoking of privileges, another a spanking…in which there is a fine line. I don’t believe the objective is to cause pain, I think the objective is simply to convey the message that for this action there is a consequence. If the spanking has the effect that the child is laughing at it and/or not learning anything from it, it’s obviously the wrong disciplinary action to use for that particular child.
You could have beat me with a bat when I was a kid and I would do the same thing over and over again; take away my bike, or make me stay at home and do chores however, and I’d be begging for mercy. Different strokes…so to speak…
I also don’t think a teacher, principal or the like can possibly ever know a child so well as to know what disciplinary action works best for which child. Only a parent can really know that. So, if a serious enough offense has arisen, the parent should be the one who administers the punishment whatever that may be, and by whatever method their child best responds to. I’d much rather take the time away from work to deal with my own child than have someone else who only cares about the school rules deal with my child.
I say ‘serious enough offense’ because I also think that if a child is throwing erasers around during class or breaking other standard classroom etiquette, the teacher has the freedom to give the child a detention, write lines, etc. But you toucha my kid…
