Parents are not really asked, though. Parent's consent is assumed, unless they explicitly opt their children out.
> Parents can put their children on the “no paddle list”—a practice encouraged by a school in Kentucky if the child “bruises easy”, suffers from severe depression or has been physically abused—but amid the back-to-school chaos many forget to submit the necessary form.
Literally adding insult to injury and completely seeing through their own policy in one line item. "Let us know if your child has been abused before so we don't accidentally abuse them again."
I didn't know that list existed and was initially happy that there was an opt out but then list or reasons parents should consider putting their child on the list just added another point to how much I hate Republicans
> In 2020 Kiory Baugh, then an ace 2nd grader in Grenada, Mississippi, was paddled by her principal even though she was on the no-paddle list. When Kiory came home from school she was in so much pain she could not sit down. The school told Julia, her mother, there was no need to take her to the hospital. Julia took her to the emergency room anyway, where the doctor told her he would have called the police if she had been hit outside of school. She missed seven days of classes to recover. After Julia complained to the district, Kiory’s teacher failed her. That summer Julia moved the family to Arkansas, where corporal punishment is less common.
Alternately, even if you are on a 'no-paddle' (wtf) list, your kid can still be badly abused by the school district with no recourse.
I'm not sure you (or perhaps even the parent comment?) quite realize what "recourse" by a father would mean in Mississippi. I read that as, shooting the principal dead and possibly turning yourself in to the police. If you're white, you'll probably get off with jail time. If you're dark skinned or non-christian probably suicide by cop to avoid the unpleasant (in)justice. It's about protecting other children and making future principals think twice.
The US is a large country with highly variable laws and customs. Just as parts of Europe refer to other parts of Europe as 'North Africa'... when you say Florida or Missippi in the US it has a similar twang.
I think you’re right, that’s what the parent comment was referring to. That seemed patently ridiculous, so I made a joke about how the recourse would be moving away.
Might be better to just make it illegal to hit children?
There's some law on the books (Texas maybe?) about it being a hanging offense to engage in cattle wrustling. Perhaps I'm remembering it incorrectly.
This is likely to be a similar sort of law (or lack of a law saying it isn't allowed), where it may technically be true that this is allowed but realistically you would end up in all sorts of legal trouble for hitting students.
From my generation at least (teenagers from the 90's), I heard stories not of beatings, but getting whacked on the knuckles by nuns in private catholic schools.
The private catholic schools in my town being a mix of kids with religious parents, bad kids who got kicked out of public high schools and parents who didn't want a co-ed education for their kids.
> This is likely to be a similar sort of law (or lack of a law saying it isn't allowed), where it may technically be true that this is allowed but realistically you would end up in all sorts of legal trouble for hitting students.
It is not; in fact, the reason states mostly have some explicit treatment in law, is that this waa tested the whole way up to the Supreme Court—Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977)—which found, that, in the absence of specific state law to the contrary, corporal punishment, by public schools, without parental consent or even notice, was Constitutionally permissible. Even people that support corporal punishment in schools often weren’t happy about this. There's no secret additional layer of law beyond the overt ones which will get people in trouble for this.
Can the children defend themselves, or are they legally required to passively accept the beatings? If you're going to beat people's kids, at least level the playing field.
I punched a teacher once in high school after he violently grabbed and yanked me. We just stared at each other, and then I walked away. I would have absolutely pressed charges otherwise.
As a parent now, god help any teacher that would dare lay hands on my kid.
They should never be expected to, but it speaks to the injustice of the abuse that the child would undoubtedly be punished further if they try to defend themselves.
Trust me, you accept the beating. The alternatives and escalation path was not something you wanted to explore. My school had waterboarding on the menu, for instance, which I cannot recommend.
And no, you can’t retaliate in secret by putting thumbtacks in the master’s shoes - that just results in cohort punishment and witch-hunts by your fellow pupils who want to skewer whoever is responsible for bringing down the wrath of god upon them.
> Can the children defend themselves, or are they legally required to passively accept the beatings?
Children are required to obey direction from school authorities within the legal scope of that authority, and in jurisdictions allowing corporal punishment may be beaten for failure to comply.
Additionally, should they resist public officials executing their lawful duties by force, this would generally be a crime (often a felony.)
So, yeah, they just have to take their beatings, or be eligible for even more beatings, or worse.
Violence and the threat of violence for breaking the law and lawful commands of "state actors" is the foundation of the entire system of government. I don't think you've stumbled on some clever hack.
I was friends with someone who did Teach for America in Mississippi. They paddled the kids in the school which my friend at first found shocking, she refused to participate.
The explanation that made the most "sense" was that, at home, corporal punishment was how the parents disciplined the kids. So if at school all you got was a verbal warning the kids wouldn't take it seriously.
IMHO by the time corporal punishment becomes 'the answer' there are way bigger structural issues to examine.
A quick note that while MS obviously doesn't ban corporal punishment statewide, the largest school system in MS does. Even in MS, the case study that leads the article, it's clear to most adults that corporal punishment of students is unacceptable.
I went to school in Mississippi in the late 80s. While corporal punishment was definitely in the student handbook as being possible, I actually never heard of anyone getting it. I heard the private school was more liberal with it than our public middle/high schools.
One thing I love about reading the Economist is the non-American perspective it gives me on American news. In the US we call this "corporeal punishment" or "spanking" and pretend like it's rare, no big deal, and maybe necessary. The Economist doesn't mince words referring to it as "hit", "beat", "strike", "hurt", and finally "criminal assault".
Edit: Language is a construct set by society. Merriam Webster states corporal punishment is the correct term, but corporeal is the word that means "of the body." Corporal used to mean of the body but is not used that way outside the specific term corporal punishment. Ignore the below.
Corporal is a rank in the military. Corporeal (pronounced something like core pore ree al) is having to do with a person's body, but isn't used in often outside of the phrase "corporeal punishment."
It does if it happens often enough, and if people accept it as such. See: "literally now literally means figuratively" and other such apparent madness.
Of course you, or I, or anyone else can refuse to accept such changes, but at the end of the day we really have nothing firmer to stand on than "I don't like it."
Personally I find myself chafing at some of changes that have become prevalent just in my lifetime, but I really don't want to be the old guy yelling "you kids get off my lawn" or whatever. So I grin and bear it and remind myself that "language changes, and it doesn't care what I think about it." :-)
US news and dictionaries say corporal like the UK.
Corporeal makes it sound like beating the physical being of the spirit. Which, depending on your views may seem right, whilst being grammatically incorrect.
Corporeal is an entirely different word, roughly meaning "with some form of body that can be physically touched". A ghost isn't corporeal, a human is. An ebook isn't corporeal, an ebook-reader is.
With auto-complete/spellcheck and neither word being used often, it's not surprising that someone would mix the two up.
I'm guilty of first using the phrase "corporeal punishment" here and I was just typing fast and not thinking. Even on second thought I'm not sure which would be "correct", they both seem right to me. (I grew up in Texas, FWIW.) I gather "corporal punishment" is the standard usage though, here's a good little writeup: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/corporal-and-c...
They have, although the article gets it wrong - the U.K. did not ban it in 1986, as my school experience attests - I was caned frequently, and a caning was, honestly, preferable to the alternatives which usually involved gravel.
It was banned in state funded schools in 1986. Public (i.e. private) schools, 1999. I suppose at least it gave parents the choice as to whether or not they’d like their kids to be beaten, and at least at school they didn’t use the buckle end of a belt, just a meter rule.
> They have, although the article gets it wrong - the U.K. did not ban it in 1986, [...]
> It was banned in state funded schools in 1986.
The article refers to “public schools” in the American sense (i.e., state funded schools)—and would be wrong otherwise, since sone of the states that ban it in public school do not in private schools. So, when it talks aboit banning it in England, it refers to the same thing: corporal punishment in state-funded schools. So the article is correct.
> In the US we call this "corporeal punishment" or "spanking" and pretend like it's rare, no big deal, and maybe necessary.
To be clear, not everyone in the US feels this way. I'm shocked and saddened that it's legal in 19 states, and I would categorically not vote for anyone who I knew would support legalizing it in the others. The sad reality is that the political system in the US can sometimes make it extremely difficult to enact and enforce popular measures.
In the UK, where the Economist is published, parents are still allowed to physically abuse their kids (within certain limits; it must be "reasonable" punishment), so unfortunately it's not all that universally a non-American perspective.
The UN Convention on the Rights of a Child specifically does not mention the use of corporal punishment and makes no binding requirement of any of its signatories to refrain from the use of corporal punishment. Such interpretations that have been attempted to be made from articles within the Convention have been rejected by multiple nations, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Hitting kids usually isn't acceptable or productive. But sometimes, rarely, it is appropriate. For instance, if a large kid is beating up a smaller kid, it may be appropriate to give the bully a small taste of what he's dishing out. A few spanks does more harm to their dignity than anything else but gets the point across. Of course I wouldn't tolerate actual beating of children.
The one time my father ever spanked me was after I attacked my little brother with a wiffle ball bat. I don't hold even the slightest grudge against him for that. On the other hand, my grandfather used to beat my father severely for things his younger brothers did wrong, under the understanding that his sons would punish each other if he punished one of them. That was clearly over the line, and my father resolved to never raise his own kids like that. And he didn't.
Should teachers be doing this though? I'm not sure. Teachers often don't have enough information to know when it is or isn't appropriate to spank a child. They don't really know what's going on in that kid's home-life. But maybe it is sometimes appropriate when they witness particularly egregious bullying at school.
It is absolutely not appropriate to physically assault a minor to retaliate for them assaulting somebody else. We don't even tolerate that logic among adults.
Corporal punishment should be used more often for adults. It is more equitable than fining people (even when those fines are scaled with wealth), and it does less damage to society than imprisonment. Imprisonment should be reserved for cases in which the public needs to be protected from the offender.
You can't retroactively unimprison a man. The time you took from him can never be returned.
Anyway, consider this common scenario in America: A man misses his child support payments. Do you, fine him, demanding money he doesn't have, which should otherwise have gone towards his child support payments? That doesn't work. Do you imprison him for a month, so he loses his job and can't make future payments? That harms the kids he's supposed to be making payments to, but is a common 'solution' used by American courts.
Better to cane the man and set him free the same day so he can continue to work and pay off his debts.
> Money cannot give you back the opportunity to raise your children
It can give them a better life. Also, this article cited a star second grader beaten against her parents’ wishes, and where the doctor felt barred from filing a compliant because it was the state that beat her. The state beating kids simply doesn’t make sense.
The simple fact of the matter is that money can neither retroactively unimprison a man, nor can it retroactively unbeat him. If you think it can do one, there's no rational reason it can't do the other. But in truth, it can't do either.
Pretending that imprisonment is reversible is just a cowardly way of coping with the possibility of harming an innocent man.
You can calculate a dollar figure for wages missed, but not time lost nor beatings sustained. Better to remove the first harm from the equation altogether.
> can calculate a dollar figure for wages missed, but not time lost nor beatings sustained. Better to remove the first harm from the equation altogether
By replacing it with the incalculable latter? What?
> It could be an option for the condemned to choose
Agreed. The way I'd like to see it done is to give people convicted of non-violent or relatively minor crimes an option between being caned and being jailed.
I don't think much rehabilitation goes on in county jails anyway. People are usually only there for a few weeks anyway; long enough to lose their job but probably not long enough to be rehabilitated (if such psychological services were even offered in the first place.)
That’s just the US’s beyond fkd up police system, though. Most of the police in Europe will actually bring the culprit to court, instead of going the medieval way of “police officer gets to be the judge and executionar” in one.
No, it is not the case that a police officer, observing a larger adult assaulting a smaller one (or any other permuation), is authorized to beat the assailant in retribution. If such an attack by a police officer was recorded on a bodycam, the current state of play in most of the US would end up with the officer fired, and a (likely unsuccessful) prosecution to follow.
There's probably more examples we can find and I agree they are very rare. But there certainly are circumstances where the right action, in the moment, is to strike a person no matter their age.
How would you disarm them without using physical force though? Especially as someone who likely wasn't trained in the art of hand-to-hand combat against an armed assailant.
I'm not saying beat them up, I'm saying stop them.
Punishments should never be creative. That's an invitation for cruel and unusual punishment. Disciplining a child is not an appropriate time to exercise your imagination.
I don't think you deserve a down vote because it sounds like you mean well, but you're wrong: kids who physically intimidate usually do so because they face violence or threat of it at home, so it's normalized.
EDIT: I will fully admit however that I threatened and will make good on the promise to hit my toddler son if he runs into the street again. He has done this multiple times already after receiving verbal warnings, shouts, and removal of privileges. My naturally more obedient older child never needed more than a simple directive not do it. Go figure - some kids are different. I am sad that it had to come to that, but it's not a lesson I can afford to have him make mistakes on and learn slowly.
> kids who physically intimidate usually do so because they face violence or threat of it at home, so it's normalized.
I don't know about "usually" but I know that it's sometimes the case, and that is main reason hesitant to say that teachers should be allowed to do this. They don't know what's going on at that kid's home.
I do know that sometimes, kids are violent little shits just because they can be. When I attacked my brother with that bat it wasn't because I was being abused by an adult at home, it was simply because my brother insulted my inability to hit a ball. I reject the narrative that bullies are categorically victims of bullying themselves.
Please read the other responses to your comment and consider the possibility that you are wrong.
Hitting children is never OK regardless of the form it takes. Context makes no difference. There is always a better option. Hitting children is the recourse of the lazy and thoughtless. If you think you MUST physically discipline a child, it's because you haven't considered sufficiently many options and thought of something better. It is a failure of imagination on your part. DON'T DO IT.
I've heard all these arguments before many times, nobody here has said anything novel. I know I'm going against the grain saying this, I knew my comment would be unpopular before I wrote it. But it is nevertheless the way I feel.
Data and evidence is very often at odds with how we feel, which is why we tend to rely upon it more than feelings and give it more approximate weight and significance. It’s also why emotional arguments intended to persuade are so dangerous to those who are easily swayed by them.
They brought back spanking when I was in high school.
Was kinda strange (and ineffective) at that age, but totally better than in school suspension.
I opted in for it twice (uniform code violations) over iss until my parents said no, he should go to iss, he's not learning his lesson lol.
As a kid I was spanked a few times, it was never that the spanking that hurt, just the fear of getting in trouble.
Conflating spanking with "hitting" seems disingenuous.
Personally some people I interact with today should have been spanked, or raised better in general.
And no I'm not talking about not violating dress codes etc, it's fine to break the rules if you're not hurting anyone. But there's a lot of bad people that would have benefitted from discipline.
> How can you define spanking without using a term like "hitting?"
You call it spanking, or slapping on the bum.
Hitting colloquially gives the impression of a closed-fist.
> seems odd to have the person in authority return the favor by hurting the kids as punishment
The world is not fair. You can pick and choose rules based on a moral code but things like dress code, drugs, etc. are the institutional rules and they have setup consequences, agree with them or not.
And if you're hurting the child you aren't spanking, you're beating.
In baseball, how is it when players hit the ball, it does not damage their knuckles?
The words "fist" and "knuckle" do not even appear on M-W's definition of hit. "Fists" appears in a sample sentence that would be redundant if "hit" assumed "fists." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hit
> Spanking is a form of corporal punishment involving the act of striking, with either the palm of the hand or an implement, the buttocks of a person to cause physical pain
Straight from wikipedia.
There is no punishment mechanism to spanking without pain. This sort of strange homeopathic idea of spanking is unrealistic and I'm unsure why you're trying to paint this false picture of the world - the vast majority of parents who spank do so with the intention of causing pain to discourage behaviour.
No, I'm doing nothing of the sort. Try precisely the physical assault you're condoning for a child on a police officer. After they break your arm, they'll put you in a lockup, and the state will follow that up with a felony prosecution.
(I don't condone police violence either; I'm laying out a positive argument, not a normative one.)
If it doesn't hurt then it's not spanking...? I don't understand these tortured semantics.
The act of spanking is to strike the butt cheeks to inflict pain as a punishment, there is no other mechanic at play. It is striking another person to hurt them.
What you're doing here, trying to shift the meaning of the word "hurt" depending on whether you're the one speaking or someone else is, is a tactic that is indistinguishable from trolling. It's fine if we're just at the limit of productive dialog here.
Slapping another adult on the bum without consent is assault or battery a lot of places. I'm in the UK where slapping your child is legal, but merely causing another adult to be in fear of imminent "unlawful physical contact" (an unwanted slap, for example) is assault even if it never actually happens.
The hypocrisy is astounding and one of the worst aspects - behavior we've outlawed against adults are being outright advocated for children in a position where they can't reasonably defend themselves.
You're seeking to justify violence and abuse, no matter how you trivialise it.
And if a teammate makes it clear they don't want to, and people still do it, it's battery in the UK, and a criminal offense. In theory it'd be an offense even without a warning, but one might expect the defence to argue they believed there had been prior consent.
My ex took someone to court over an unwanted slap on the bum a while back, in case someone thinks this is hypothetic, as the CPS agreed it was a crime though they cautioned they'd have a hard time proving the case.
I'm not conflating anything - it is assault or battery when done to an adult, and it is no less assault or battery when done to a child whether or not the law recognises it.
Try to do anything to another adult with consent and you'll have criminal charges.
> You can't ground another adult, or take away their stuff. You can with your child.
You can tell another adult they are grounded all you want. You just can't rely on physical violence to enforce it.
With respect to possessions, there's a stark difference between bodily autonomy and property.
That you're stretching to the point of comparing violence with taking away their stuff is disgusting.
The information is that it teaches violence is acceptable and people will unironically respond with something like "I was slapped as a kid and I'm not a person who thinks violence is acceptable... that's why I think slapping kids is okay".
If they then do see the irony they'll argue that their form of hitting the child is completely different from the bad form of hitting a child.
I've always wondered why assault statutes don't apply in these scenarios. I presume in loco parentis is a defense? Is this something that is well tested by the courts in the places where this still takes place?
My understanding is that it's explicitly drawn from English common law; it's not derived from "in loco parentis", but rather a specific exception to the rule about assault.
In the states that ban it (and the major cities in most of the states that don't), it's assault, of course.
> I've always wondered why assault statutes don't apply in these scenarios.
Because assault statutes have an exception for lawful force, and the applicable laws (either statute or common law) provide a legal privilege.
> I presume in loco parentis is a defense?
Not a “defense”, but in some schemes it may be part of the legal basis. (In states where there is a parental option, this is clearly the case.)
> Is this something that is well tested by the courts in the places where this still takes place?
It is worth noting that most of the explicit rules prohibiting or regulating corporal punishment are the outcome of debate in the late 70s and into the 80s triggered by a 1977 US Supreme Court decision that found, in the absence of state law to the contrary, that corporal punishment in public schools was legal, even when contrary to the express wishes of parents.
Very few states had any explicit law on the issue prior to that point.
The map on this school colors Illinois as on the lower, but nonzero, end of the corporal punishment spectrum. But corporal punishment is illegal in Illinois, by statute (105 ILCS 5/24-24). The Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, where the Economist sourced the data for this map, lists Illinois as one of the dark-blue states that bans corporal punishment outright.
There is nothing in the law of some states that explicitly prevents schools from beating children. The protection that may be granted by the constitution doesn't apply to children for some reason. Did I understand this correctly?
Most states outlaw corporal punishment in schools, but some do not, because there is a tradition going all the way back to English common law (like, it's in Blackstone's explicitly) that moderate physical correction by schoolmasters is an exception to the general rule that people must be free from physical assault.
In the states that don't currently ban corporal punishments in schools, it's likely that the municipal centers of those states do. By way of example: this article had to focus on Union County MS, which is in the middle of nowhere even for Mississippi. Jackson is the municipal center of Mississippi, and it bans corporal punishment.
Thanks. I do get that there's places that don't outlaw corporal punishment.
Where I am lost is that more general rules do not seem to apply. Adults cannot beat eachother without consent or ending up in criminal court. Teachers may be employed by the government, but I doubt they have the privileges of law enforcement. Rules of the schools are not even law (?!), probably closer to terms of service, which would make violations a matter of a civil court? Maybe because attending school isn't compulsory, attending voluntarily implies consent?
From the comments my views will definitely be in the minority here.
Personal experience: Every school I attended through 12th grade had corporal punishment in place. In 5th grade I was punished by a Catholic Nun who broke a ruler over my hands as they were laying flat on the desk. It was deserved and fixed the problem at hand and by example to the other students. (haha no pun intended). I actually have a fond memory of it now as they made my parents pay for the broken ruler. We laugh about it now and then. It happened again in HS and remember being scared shitless because it was being administered by a teacher with a good rep for painful swats. It solved the issues that time as well. Neither instance caused any psychological damage to me(that i’m aware of) and helped keep our learning environment a place where people can actually go to learn.
Corporal punishment is no longer practiced in my state. I would support it if it came back. It’s an effective tool.
So any form of self defense is abuse? I'm not sure you've thought this through. Trivializing complex issues is the kneejerk response for many, but there isn't a simple moral line of thinking that billions of people have overlooked.
Yes, it's abusive, and with self defence that is the point: your attacker has deprived you of safety and of another immediate recourse, so you're forced to lower yourself to their level.
It doesn't make it good; it makes it necessary, and for that reason we often consider it legitimate.
If an adult tried to assault my son, and he hit back, I wouldn't consider it good, but I would be proud he felt able to defend himself against a violent attacker. Even if that attacker was a teacher.
Abuse is a term used to describe impropriety of action. The idea that impropriety is used to counter impropriety is not coherent. Self-defense is proper (suitable, appropriate, etc) use of force, insofar as an individual values safety of their person. Self-defense is necessarily not abuse. I dont think any amount of rewording will change this.
Since English is my second language, I checked a few dictionaries just now to check if I got what I intended wrong. Only one (Cambridge) restricted abuse to only the sense of impropriety of action. The others included variations such as physical maltreatment (Merriam Webster, American Heritage Dictionary), to treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way (Collins / dictionary.com), "Abuse of someone is cruel and violent treatment of them" (Collins, collinsdictionary.com).
If we restrict it to the impropriety of action, then I agree it does not apply to self defence, but that was not the meaning of my reply. I of course can't speak to the poster of the original statement, so if we interpret it as impropriety of action, I agree with you; in the broader sense allowed by the other dictionaries I stand by what I wrote.
If it's abuse when done to an adult, it's abuse when done to a child. Doing any of this to an adult would be assault or battery in most countries. Of anyone hurt my child that way and the police didn't do anything, you can bet I'd find a way to give the abusers a taste of their own medicine.
It's always funny how, when you engage with the "kinder, gentler" crowd, they immediately prove themselves morally unsophisticated. Striking a child is abuse and if your child was struck, you would take revenge by hitting the perpetrator. Okay.
If my child is struck and there's no legal recourse, then yes, I would lower myself to their level.
If society creates an unsafe environment, then sometimes violence is necessary as a means to fight an abusive regime and cause change. That does not mean it's a nice thing - last resorts seldom are.
That you think I'm the "kinder, gentler" crowd is your mistake. I just don't like injustice, and punching down against someone unable to defend themselves is one of the worst forms of injustice.
Child abuse is any physical, emotional, or sexual mistreatment or neglect of a child.
Corporal punishment can be harmful to children and may lead to long-term negative outcomes, such as increased aggression, mental health problems, and poor academic performance.
That’s not to speak to who’s enforcing it and on who.
By this definition, depending on who gets to define "mistreatment", any negative reinforcement at all would count as abuse, not just corporal punishment.
Why? Because "emotional mistreatment" is a catch-all term.
For example, it's easy to make the argument that time-out, a common negative reinforcement strategy among parents, constitutes emotional mistreatment. After all it is just a form of solitary confident, and solitary is known for how it emotionally wrecks adults.
Beings that this was an approved and accepted method of discipline where I attended school your swing would have landed you an expulsion and hopefully a charge of assault by the authorities. If you happen to be a male your comment on swinging on a lady has significance beyond your understanding.
You can't possibly be serious. Her assault came first, it's just that it's somehow acceptable to you. It is perfectly reasonable to respond to assault with violence of your own to dissuade further assault especially if it is the only way to ensure that teacher doesn't break a ruler over your hands and possibly fracture a knuckle again.
You realize that in most states if someone broke a ruler smacking you with it, that would constitute an assault charge and self defense would be considered reasonable. The only difference is that adults are allowed to do so while children aren't in your example.
What you're telling people is that assault by the state against children is acceptable.
Same. We've been smacking kids for tens of thousands of years to protect them and society and somehow we went to the moon. There is a difference between smacking kids and abusing them.
I got smacked, but in a way that was traumatizing(?) as I remember every second of it decades later. Still, it did actually encourage me to improve the thing I got smacked about and probably led to me being as successful as I am (such as it were.)
It is fairly normal for victims of violence to seek to explain away the abuse they were subjected to as deserved or necessary when carried out by someone in authority over them.
It doesn't change that it is harmful abuse. I'm sorry you were subjected to that kind of abuse, even though you believe it was justified.
There's nothing to suggest it serves a legitimate purpose.
> Well there’s nothing if you disregard personal testimony as Stockholm syndrome
I don’t disregard anything as Stockholm Syndrome, since that doesn’t exist.
However, I do disregard anecdotal conclusory testimony about causative processes, as a general rule. I’ll accept testimony about facts plausibly within the knowledge of the person testifying as being (barring special reason for suspicion on those points) as trustworthy as the person testifying.
>> There's nothing to suggest it serves a legitimate purpose.
Well nothing except my personal experience which you clearly disregarded by categorizing me without any evidence as a victim of violence nor do I see this as abuse(obviously).
No offense taken by the comment btw I just don’t believe you are correct in your attempt to analyze my particular situation.
No, a description of why personal anecdotes from victims of violence often contradict the total absence of data showing the purported benefits often used by said victims to try to justify and make sense of the abuse they were subjected to.
If there were data showing improved outcomes among this group compared to those not subjected to violence, there'd be reason to listen to their accounts, but since there isn't independent evidence to support these claims, and it's not a controlled sample, their anecdotes have little value.
Is there any evidence for it being "harmful" (specifically institutional punishment, not random poor parenting)? If anything, constant reported decline in kids' (and adults') mental health as schools and parents get more and more protective indicates coddling might be the harmful abuse.
It can be an effective tool. Or it can be abused (and, in fact, be abuse).
My own memory is of the time I wasn't hit. I was in elementary school. The principal was out shoveling snow off of the sidewalk where it crossed a driveway. I was out on recess, and I hit her with a snowball. She didn't hit me, though school policy allowed it at the time. Instead, she just had me shovel the snow. (Duh... what did I think was going to happen?)
I can say that, for me, being told by someone I respected that I was doing something wrong was always enough to stop poor behavior.
Hitting a child to teach them could be better than some alternatives. But it's definitely not the best approach. It seems like an option for those without any idea on what else to do.
https://www.unmc.edu/newsroom/2002/06/28/dr-larzelere-featur... - "There is general consensus that corporal punishment is effective in getting children to comply immediately while at the same time there is caution from child abuse researchers that corporal punishment by its nature can escalate into physical maltreatment," - E. T. Gershoff
Much like Abraham Wald pointed out in WWII, many studies are unintentionally magnifying the statistical outliers incorrectly. As Greg Wilson once said - (summarized) Gender inequity in science being biologically gender influenced is settled as false. The efficacy of corporal punishment is a scottish verdict.
The efficacy and/or benefit of corporal punishment, is undecided.
The first link you provided, which does not appear to support corporal punishment, does not contain the string you quoted; in fact, the word "corporal" appears in it only twice.
The last link you provided is a methodological critique of another study, and its authors are of questionable authority (for instance, a dev psych professor at a private Christian college).
> The first link you provided, which does not appear to support corporal punishment, does not contain the string you quoted; in fact, the word "corporal" appears in it only twice.
Gershoff's contributions to the debate are not a singular paper.
All I can tell you is that you provided a link that did not say what you said it did, and attributed to it a quotation that did not appear in the article.
I reloaded it and searched for the word "comply", which seems unlikely to have been a typo in your original quotation, and: no, that quotation is not present in the article.
Violence is the second most effective form of persuasion known to man, following shame.
We do use violence in limited fashion, around the world, today. In some societies, unmitigated violence was acceptable for a time. Why is it always curtailed? Unequivocally, murder is more effective at achieving settlement in many disputes. Expediency is not the only concern. Society is built on maintained relationships and mutual agreements, not wanton acts of passion to form networks that are more effective and stable than the individual.
Children are not considered fully informed or stable. Shame is difficult to instill, when there is no preconceived notion of social acceptance. Violence is the natural fallback. Is picking up a child and moving them out of the way of a vehicle, when they don't want to be moved, violence? No. Violence isn't simply an action, but the act and intention and efficacy. Modern societies have balanced these concerns for adults and children. Self-defense and purposeful administrative allowances for violence (police, army) are the norm.
The question of what the limits of perceived violence for children is optimal, is still debated.
A broad consensus that application of corporal punishment in children is positively correlated with aggression, poorer mental health outcomes, and domestic violence.
A quick, preemptive edit:
If you take the time to get the ranked list of journals in developmental psychology and then search for this question in those journals, you'll find the consensus gets significantly stronger. As you've already shown us, if you instead go the other direction, and find un-reviewed papers co-authored by professors at private Christian colleges, you can find counterexamples.
Since you're very busy replying to my posts with non-citations, let's go through some of additional ones, most of which cite the study by ET Gershoff.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/21/04/effect-spanking-br... - This study determines that spanking (as well as other stimuli, like observed violence) may influence behavior negatively. This is used as justification to determine that spanking is detrimental. The study does not expand this to corporal punishment overall, state sponsored or otherwise.
Getting access to papers directly is often troublesome, so there may be an additional step of clicking on a link to get the PDF. 2/3 of these papers focus on effects of pre-school corporal punishment (ages 2-6) exclusively, which is hard to correlate to the topic but provides solid evidence that corporal punishment (without qualification) for infants correlates to behavioral problems.
I would not agree that there is consensus nor is there conclusive data in regard to corporal punishment in schools (post-preschool). This is not an issue of convenience, but has large social implications. If you could provide something a bit more compelling, I'm open to it. I don't have a vested interest, other than a higher standard of proof, such that I can defend conclusive evidence.
It's not strange _at_all_ to present all aspects of an unknown in a good faith effort to determine the truth. That being said, it's not surprising you decide something is settled only based on things you agree with.
We are definitely the only two people reading this, and you're likely to have the last word because it's not going to occur to me to go back and reread a 2-week-old thread, but if you'd like to rebut anything I say in the future, I recommend presenting evidence that contradicts my argument rather than evidence that supports it. Your problem isn't that I refuse to read things I disagree with; it's that you didn't find anything for me to disagree with.
Do you honestly put any stock in that stuff? We have had decades of research into child rearing and education in the west. If it was actually reliable, it should have produced better behaved kids that do better in school and have better outcomes. The absence of any evidence of that is glaring.
The greatest generation that built this country into what it is were subject to corporal punishment. Today, Asian immigrants use corporal punishment and their kids vastly outperform the children of native born Americans. Maybe there is no correlation between those things, but that is much more concrete evidence than some papers in a psychology journal.
Yes, I do: parental corporal punishment is, unfortunately, most common in the families with with the worst outcomes. Asian American parents are among those least likely to employ corporal punishment. That's unsurprising to me; I have a generally favorable opinion of the parenting culture you're alluding to (even though I wouldn't have considered it for my own kids), and corporal punishment is (what's the right word?) stupid.
As my sibling commenter notes, we have a neat little case study here, too: we allow corporal punishment in public schools in a minority of states. Overlay outcomes by school district; how's it working out?
As another poster said, multiple states have corporal punishment as not only allowed but encouraged, and so far we haven't seen the better outcomes you claim in terms of better behaved kids.
So in the absence of any evidence that corporal punishment works, the obvious answer should be to not do it.
Violence is effective at getting immediate compliance. It is not effective at producing well adjusted people with a healthy attitude to violence, nor is it effective at producing lasting compliance.
That you seek to compare abuse with saving a child from being hit by a vehicle is a astonishing. We recognises the necessity of physical contact that would sometimes be unlawful when that contact is necessary all the time, irrespective of age.
This attempt at acting as if this has anything to do with children's age or development in order to allow it to be used to justify abuse of children that'd be a crime when carried out against adults fails in that basis: we know how to recognise the difference.
Yet somehow we are told to accept violence against children we're not ourselves willing to be subjected to.
> It is not effective at producing well adjusted people with a healthy attitude to violence, nor is it effective at producing lasting compliance.
I don't know what "healthy attitude to violence" is when there's a disagreement by what "violence" means. So I'll have to await some clarification, other than simply sharing your unspecified views. Police carry weapons in modern societies across the globe. Claiming violence does not produce lasting compliance is an interesting belief that is not shared by the majority of the world, so I find this claim uncompelling. There are exceptions ofc, like Japan, where a large part of the peacekeeping force patrols without weapons. While it is effective at times, the lack of efficacy can also be seen on Youtube.
> That you seek to compare abuse with saving a child from being hit by a vehicle is a astonishing
I did not compare them directly. I illustrated the use of the term "violence" is overly broad, as unconsented forceful action is not unwarranted. The question is degree, intent, and efficacy, as stated. Please don't misrepresent my statements. You are imagining I meant "abuse", which is another broad term that is dishonestly equated to "corporal punishment" or "violence". I have trouble teasing out what you specifically trying to communicate, other than a strong disdain for corporal punishment without qualification.
> Claiming violence does not produce lasting compliance is an interesting belief that is not shared by the majority of the world, so I find this claim uncompelling.
It's a belief that is backed by the total absence of evidence of a lasting effect on compliance from the use of violence. That societies continue to condone the use of violence despite the total lack of anything to suggest it works speaks to the pathology of the political process, not to the efficacy of violence.
There are situations where violence becomes necessary, such as self-defence or a defensive war, as a means to achieve short term compliance absent other alternatives, but anyone who believes in a beneficial long term effect on compliance is a fool.
> Said no modern, respectable, progressive, white, American scientist who has studied the phenomenon within the last thirty years.
Fixed it for you.
Here's the basic problem:
- Most punishments for kids outside of mainstream cultural norms are harmful
- Most punishments in anger are harmful
Living within that context, I don't use corporal punishment, and I think it would be harmful to my child. However, I am not at all ready to generalize the results to outside of that context.
Another way I'd frame it: The research evidence is at the level where I'm glad to call it a best practice (which I follow), and encourage others to do so. It's not yet at the level where I'm ready to judge people -- especially in other cultures -- who don't.
I worked with an older african american many years ago who in his own words grew up in the ghetto. He told me once that, "If we don't beat our kids at home the cops will do it in the street." Not advocating either way, but the perspective stuck with me.
> I wotked with an older african american many years ago who in his own words grew up in the ghetto. He told me once that, "If we don't beat our kids at home the cops will do it in the street."
I suspect a thorough investigation of the African Americans beaten in the streets by cops would find that being beaten by their parents as a child is not substantial protection against being beaten in the streets by cops.
I would like to see a thorough investigation BY African Americans rather than merely OF by African Americans.
We have an unfortunate history where investigations OF African Americans BY white Americans led to not only incorrect but also very unfortunate conclusions.
Entirely possible. I don't know that he was rationalizing as much as passing on accepted wisdom. Undoubtedly escaping depends on more than one variable.
> Neither instance caused any psychological damage
Really now? I would consider acute fear to be, at the very least, psychologically detrimental, if not to you then to the vast majority of people. Generally, fear is not conducive to a healthy learning environment.
a) that corporal punishment is the only or only effective way to ensure nobody or at least less students have to fear other peers
b) corporal punishment is any effective at all
c) the necessity to fear some peers has a strong connection to whether they are 'controllable'
Have you been to an American school lately? If you have a better solution I’m all ears. Because whatever we are doing (and it’s overwhelmingly not corporal punishment, even in the states where it is legal) is not working. The inmates are running the asylum.
If an adult breaks voluntarily an item on me to cause pain, the instinct is to sue (a form of force), or respond with force (depends extremely on context) or flee. I don't think the situation you describe seems healthy.
I have at least 2 memories where I have been spanked really hard from my parents due to being misunderstood.
What's the consequence of that? Who is going to punish the parent? In children's view, that's a major punishment for no correct reason, what does it teaches about law?
I agree. I’m an Asian immigrant and like most Asians my parents used corporal punishment sometimes and it was an effective tool. (Relevant: https://fb.watch/iaTKO2jJnB/?mibextid=vTn5qL.) I don’t use corporal punishment with my kids, because my wife is a white American, and well we’ll see how they turn out.
There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25. You can’t reason with kids. There is a place for physical consequences that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities.
The move to ban corporal punishment doesn’t seem to have produced equally effective alternatives. At least from my experience in America, it seems like parents just simply put up with poorly behaved kids. It’s a sort of luxury belief. In a subsistence economy you need kids to behave because mistakes can be fatal. In rich country, you can put up with poorly behaved kids because you just have so much margin.
According to Gershoff (cited elsewhere on this thread as well), in a study of 20,000 kindergarteners, Asian American families are the cohort least likely to employ corporal punishment.
I'm sure your kids will be fine; they have lots going for them.
One, this seems to rely on GSS data, which is conducted only in English and Spanish. Just 44% of for example foreign born Chinese Americans are proficient in English. So the GSS data is going to heavily skew towards assimilated, affluent Asians.
Two, the survey question is idiomatic English. It refers to a “good hard spanking.” I don’t think any of my immigrant family would say they do that to their kids, even they do use physical discipline. Non-native English speakers are going to be much less likely to understand what “hard” (or even “spanking”) means in this context.
Three, the survey is of Asian Americans, not immigrants. A survey of Latinos showed that the percentage that use corporal punishment drops dramatically in the second generation. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true for Asian Americans also. But by the second generation, Asians enjoy no advantages in outcomes relative to other native born Americans.
What’s your standard for “fine?” It’s shocking how hard it is to keep kids from sopping up the worst aspects of American culture. Unfortunately I think there’s a good chance that one of the three will end up childless, unmarried, or divorced. Where I’m from I would have a reasonable expectation that none of those three would happen.
You linked the same thing twice, so I don't know which Reddit thread you're referring to. "Asian" is more than half the world's population; the "model minority" thing is problematic in part because lots of Asian families have poor socioeconomic outcomes in the US. But the cohort captured by the study overlaps pretty completely the cohort of children you're implying have unusually good outcomes.
And, of course, the other half of the argument is hard to knock down: incidence of corporal punishment clearly doesn't track good economic outcomes. The opposite is much closer to the truth; it probably is the truth, for in part mechanistic reasons (hitting kids damages them, impedes their ability to succeed).
> "Asian" is more than half the world's population; the "model minority" thing is problematic in part because lots of Asian families have poor socioeconomic outcomes in the US. But the cohort captured by the study overlaps pretty completely the cohort of children you're implying have unusually good outcomes.
Closer to the opposite is true. Well assimilated second and third generation Asians don’t do any better than similarly affluent white Americans. It’s the kids of poor Asians—children of Indian gas station owners or Chinese restaurant workers, etc.—that have unusual outcomes. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are 2.5x more likely to end up in the top 20% as comparably situated white kids: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y....
It’s true that the “model minority” label is misleading as applied to Chinese or Indian people who come here under H1B to work at Google. The fact that those people do well is just filtering. But don’t forget that the American immigration system is one of chain migration. Those immigrants bring over family who often aren’t affluent. But the kids of those people also tend to do very well. And then there are the myriad groups who mostly didn’t come to America through systems like H1B that filter for educated, affluent people. The poverty rate among Vietnamese, who came here as refugees, in 1980 was higher than among black people. Today the median household income of US-born Vietnamese is significantly higher than for white Americans. The same is true for Filipinos.
I don't disagree with the thread that the headlines about the survey are bad and generalize ludicrously about a huge group of people with totally unrelated cultures.
My point is that when you allude to the academic success of Asian American families, you are discussing exactly the cohort that thread complains is overindexed in the study. The study (and the thread) support my argument, and gravely undermine yours.
Hitting children is not a good way to improve academic outcomes. All the evidence we have right now suggests that, at best, it does nothing; at worst, it damages children and leads to markedly worse outcomes.
> There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25. You can’t reason with kids. There is a place for physical consequences that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities.
Grounding and taking away their computer is a physical consequence that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities. It's not clear to me why their still-developing brains would be an argument for inflicting violence on them. Is there any level at all of physical abuse you couldn't support with this logic?
> In rich country, you can put up with poorly behaved kids because you just have so much margin.
“Abuse” is an emotive term you’re applying to punishment. My two year old smacks my four year old when he gets in his face. Neither kid is going to be permanently traumatized by that.
> A self-sustaining long-term advantage.
The empirical evidence is the opposite: developed countries became rich under one kind of culture, and due to social changes in the last half century their social capital is crumbling. On myriad indicators, from loneliness to birth rates to social trust, these countries are on an unsustainable path. Literally: they have been reduced to importing people from countries with “backwards” (but perhaps, if we are honest, more viable) cultures.
> There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25
How exactly is this a rational argument? You're essentially arguing in favor of corporal punishment against people until the age of 25, since you stated that a 'human brain isn't fully developed until 25' and 'you can't reason with kids'. Do you believe that college students should also be beaten by their professors for being disruptive?
And in comparison it's common knowledge that the worst way to train animals is through violence. We can reason even less with a dog or a cat than we can a teenage individual, but in your view it's rational to punish kids with violence but doing the same to an animal is abuse.
It's completely vacuous. A human brain isn't fully developed until 25; therefore you can do whatever you want to under 25s? No, that's obviously stupid.
My dad grew up in Shanghai and often made a point of emphasizing how lucky we were to be children in America. We were spanked and occasionally slapped in the face, sometimes for small acts of disobedience or unhappiness. Though I suppose it could have just felt that way from our perspective.
I can tell you though that getting hit didn't teach me anything useful at all. Certainly not about reason. It taught me that when reason fails you just rely on your temper. We weren't "corrected" by the punishment in a long term sense, both of my brothers and I just emulated it (to varying degrees).
If you have boys, be careful about modeling physical aggression for them as a norm. You might, say, hit the oldest one as punishment and then weeks later the younger one somehow has a broken arm. Or something happens at school.
We weren't exposed to the world that my dad was growing up in WWII China -- an occupying army, nearby factories blowing up, etc. That doesn't make it a luxury belief that you shouldn't hit your kids. There are consequences to it that go beyond the lessons you want to teach them.
And if effectiveness were the only criterion against which to judge an act, then maybe one would be justified in supporting violence and threats of violence against children. (Although even there, in aggregate, I’m skeptical that corporal punishment is effective.) But in any case, not all effective actions are morally sound.
And you're right to be skeptical. There's evidence that it's an effective tool for securing short-term compliance, but the consensus, among dozens of studies, is that it's positively correlated with bad long-term outcomes; most famously, aggression and domestic violence, but also mental health problems.
I got beaten once in school by a teacher, and it was well deserved and fixed the problem at hand.
But my mother told me once, that when she was in school her teacher was fixated at one girl and did beat her often and mostly for no good reason. The girl was from a poor family, and my mother was upset by the unjustice, but never spoke up, IIRC.
So YMMV.
At the end, I think such occasional injustice is the lesser evil compared to the sheepish society and nanny states that are the consequence of the pathetic antiviolent decadence we have nowadays in most of the nation states.
The antiviolence should be clear reading the most comments to the original post. Denying the violent part of the nature of the monkey horde Homo sapiens is pathetic.
And that in all industrialised nations - if not in all else as well-, throw-away society and obscene consumerism are the dominant hype should be obvious.
> a Catholic Nun who broke a ruler over my hands as they were laying flat on the desk
What the fuck kind of shitty human being is this? Can you even imagine doing that? Putting someone’s hands flat on a desk and hitting as hard as you can with a ruler? That’s some next level twisted psychopathic shit here.
> I actually have a fond memory of it now
There’s your psychological damage. That’s not a normal reaction, even years after.
> It was deserved and fixed the problem at hand and by example to the other students
2 questions for you:
- did it fix anything? Did you learn a lesson or were you just scared of getting caught? I guarantee the only lesson other students learned was « don’t get caught »
- assuming it fixed the issue somehow, was physical abuse the only way to do that?
It's highly variable. I didn't go to a Catholic school but where I grew up there were religious camps parents could send their kids to, where they could be hit. Some of those kids had problems with drugs or aggression, but others were just queer in one sense or another. If the Catholics can hit then so can the Pentecostal and Baptist and Mormon teachers as well, and you might not have appreciated their discipline as much.
While I think corporeal punishment is wrong and should be outlawed, I also feel that there is far far too much leeway in public schools for disruptive kids. If a kid is causing ongoing disruption in classrooms it is time for them to be ejected from the school and become the parent and state government's responsibility to be put in institutions more capable of handling them. Schools are there for learning and not for babysitting disruptive children.
> A child in a similar situation could be removed from their home.
No, they couldn’t; in every one of those states (and many where corporal punishment in schools is prohibited) corporal punishment by parents or guardians is permitted.
> This feels like state sponsored child abuse.
It is.
> When does the federal government intervine?
It has very little authority to, excepy perhaps via funding mandates for schools. Were children considered a suspect class under the 14th Amendment (they seem to meet the usual test, but have not been so recognized), arguably the enforcement clause of the 14th Amendment might give a basis.
Practically speaking, 19 states is almost enough, alone, to block Congressional action via a Senate filibuster, so even if there was a Constitutional basis, federal action would be difficult.
I do remember my 5th grade teacher had a cracked paddle sitting on the chalkboard at all times. He pointed it out when we started the class and it was there as a daily reminder. This was a US public school in the mid-80s. Nobody back then had a problem with it. Certainly a different time.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] thread> Parents can put their children on the “no paddle list”—a practice encouraged by a school in Kentucky if the child “bruises easy”, suffers from severe depression or has been physically abused—but amid the back-to-school chaos many forget to submit the necessary form.
Literally adding insult to injury and completely seeing through their own policy in one line item. "Let us know if your child has been abused before so we don't accidentally abuse them again."
Alternately, even if you are on a 'no-paddle' (wtf) list, your kid can still be badly abused by the school district with no recourse.
The US is a large country with highly variable laws and customs. Just as parts of Europe refer to other parts of Europe as 'North Africa'... when you say Florida or Missippi in the US it has a similar twang.
Might be better to just make it illegal to hit children?
This is likely to be a similar sort of law (or lack of a law saying it isn't allowed), where it may technically be true that this is allowed but realistically you would end up in all sorts of legal trouble for hitting students.
> In 2018, the year for which the latest numbers are available, 69,000 American children were hit by public-school staff
The private catholic schools in my town being a mix of kids with religious parents, bad kids who got kicked out of public high schools and parents who didn't want a co-ed education for their kids.
You are not wrong: "cattle rustling" is indeed still a hanging offense in Texas.
What makes this a bit interesting is that, technically, if you eat a steak and then don't pay for it, you have engaged in "cattle rustling".
So, dine and dash at a steakhouse could legally be punished by a hanging.
It is not; in fact, the reason states mostly have some explicit treatment in law, is that this waa tested the whole way up to the Supreme Court—Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977)—which found, that, in the absence of specific state law to the contrary, corporal punishment, by public schools, without parental consent or even notice, was Constitutionally permissible. Even people that support corporal punishment in schools often weren’t happy about this. There's no secret additional layer of law beyond the overt ones which will get people in trouble for this.
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/09/19/the-schoolhouse-gate-sc...
Edit: The question was rhetorical, to point out the absurdity of the situation.
As a parent now, god help any teacher that would dare lay hands on my kid.
Absolutely a person should be able to prove how tough they are.
Bare handed.
And no, you can’t retaliate in secret by putting thumbtacks in the master’s shoes - that just results in cohort punishment and witch-hunts by your fellow pupils who want to skewer whoever is responsible for bringing down the wrath of god upon them.
Fear is an exquisite control mechanism.
When and where did you go to school?
Children are required to obey direction from school authorities within the legal scope of that authority, and in jurisdictions allowing corporal punishment may be beaten for failure to comply.
Additionally, should they resist public officials executing their lawful duties by force, this would generally be a crime (often a felony.)
So, yeah, they just have to take their beatings, or be eligible for even more beatings, or worse.
Which is permitted by their state laws.
>In my opinion, it’s child abuse
I agree.
EDIT: This is still serious and bad. Please don't misinterpret me.
The explanation that made the most "sense" was that, at home, corporal punishment was how the parents disciplined the kids. So if at school all you got was a verbal warning the kids wouldn't take it seriously.
IMHO by the time corporal punishment becomes 'the answer' there are way bigger structural issues to examine.
If this is what's notable about education there, you're probably right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenada,_Mississippi#Education
It was his first year of teaching (so he was about 22) and he only ever did it to one kid who was a notorious trouble making.
He was telling me just before Christmas that he still remembers that kid's name, and still regrets doing it and wishes he didn't.
My Dad is now 71 years old.
Corporal is a rank in the military. Corporeal (pronounced something like core pore ree al) is having to do with a person's body, but isn't used in often outside of the phrase "corporeal punishment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporal_punishment
Their, they're and there are commonly misused, but that doesn't change what each means.
It does if it happens often enough, and if people accept it as such. See: "literally now literally means figuratively" and other such apparent madness.
Of course you, or I, or anyone else can refuse to accept such changes, but at the end of the day we really have nothing firmer to stand on than "I don't like it."
For now, yes. 110 years from now? Who knows?
Personally I find myself chafing at some of changes that have become prevalent just in my lifetime, but I really don't want to be the old guy yelling "you kids get off my lawn" or whatever. So I grin and bear it and remind myself that "language changes, and it doesn't care what I think about it." :-)
With auto-complete/spellcheck and neither word being used often, it's not surprising that someone would mix the two up.
It was banned in state funded schools in 1986. Public (i.e. private) schools, 1999. I suppose at least it gave parents the choice as to whether or not they’d like their kids to be beaten, and at least at school they didn’t use the buckle end of a belt, just a meter rule.
> It was banned in state funded schools in 1986.
The article refers to “public schools” in the American sense (i.e., state funded schools)—and would be wrong otherwise, since sone of the states that ban it in public school do not in private schools. So, when it talks aboit banning it in England, it refers to the same thing: corporal punishment in state-funded schools. So the article is correct.
To be clear, not everyone in the US feels this way. I'm shocked and saddened that it's legal in 19 states, and I would categorically not vote for anyone who I knew would support legalizing it in the others. The sad reality is that the political system in the US can sometimes make it extremely difficult to enact and enforce popular measures.
Interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._ratification_of_the_Conve...
Republicans will not pass this because it calls for children to receive, among other things, access to health care.
The one time my father ever spanked me was after I attacked my little brother with a wiffle ball bat. I don't hold even the slightest grudge against him for that. On the other hand, my grandfather used to beat my father severely for things his younger brothers did wrong, under the understanding that his sons would punish each other if he punished one of them. That was clearly over the line, and my father resolved to never raise his own kids like that. And he didn't.
Should teachers be doing this though? I'm not sure. Teachers often don't have enough information to know when it is or isn't appropriate to spank a child. They don't really know what's going on in that kid's home-life. But maybe it is sometimes appropriate when they witness particularly egregious bullying at school.
Basically, Singapore has the right idea.
Rich kids don’t get beaten.
> Singapore has the right idea
See above.
Corporeal punishment shares due process issues with the death penalty. If you beat the wrong guy, it’s harder to undo than unlocking the prison door.
Anyway, consider this common scenario in America: A man misses his child support payments. Do you, fine him, demanding money he doesn't have, which should otherwise have gone towards his child support payments? That doesn't work. Do you imprison him for a month, so he loses his job and can't make future payments? That harms the kids he's supposed to be making payments to, but is a common 'solution' used by American courts.
Better to cane the man and set him free the same day so he can continue to work and pay off his debts.
But you can return the time unserved. It’s also easier to turn time into money damages than pain.
It can give them a better life. Also, this article cited a star second grader beaten against her parents’ wishes, and where the doctor felt barred from filing a compliant because it was the state that beat her. The state beating kids simply doesn’t make sense.
Pretending that imprisonment is reversible is just a cowardly way of coping with the possibility of harming an innocent man.
Straw man. Nobody said this. It’s easier to reverse unserved time. And it’s easier to calculate money damages for mis-spent time.
By replacing it with the incalculable latter? What?
It could be an option for the condemned to choose: some amount of lashing, or some time of forced labor directed to restore the damage from the crime.
It would be less educational and correctional though.
Agreed. The way I'd like to see it done is to give people convicted of non-violent or relatively minor crimes an option between being caned and being jailed.
I don't think much rehabilitation goes on in county jails anyway. People are usually only there for a few weeks anyway; long enough to lose their job but probably not long enough to be rehabilitated (if such psychological services were even offered in the first place.)
Otherwise, a life sentence, with the right to appeal, is more error-proof.
Incarceration is an assault upon the person as much as a beating is - and incarceration usually involves plenty of beatings, regardless.
What if they're pointing a loaded gun at you? Think I'd rather hit the kid than get shot ...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/us/virginia-school-shooting/i...
Or coming at you or another student with an axe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Valley_High_School_attac...
There's probably more examples we can find and I agree they are very rare. But there certainly are circumstances where the right action, in the moment, is to strike a person no matter their age.
If you're able to disarm the child or remove everyone in the vicinity to safety, would you still feel the need to beat them? To what end?
I'm not saying beat them up, I'm saying stop them.
EDIT: I will fully admit however that I threatened and will make good on the promise to hit my toddler son if he runs into the street again. He has done this multiple times already after receiving verbal warnings, shouts, and removal of privileges. My naturally more obedient older child never needed more than a simple directive not do it. Go figure - some kids are different. I am sad that it had to come to that, but it's not a lesson I can afford to have him make mistakes on and learn slowly.
I don't know about "usually" but I know that it's sometimes the case, and that is main reason hesitant to say that teachers should be allowed to do this. They don't know what's going on at that kid's home.
I do know that sometimes, kids are violent little shits just because they can be. When I attacked my brother with that bat it wasn't because I was being abused by an adult at home, it was simply because my brother insulted my inability to hit a ball. I reject the narrative that bullies are categorically victims of bullying themselves.
I disagree that these two sentenves can simultaneously be true; punishment that is not productive is, ipso facto, not appropriate.
There is no contradiction here.
Hitting children is never OK regardless of the form it takes. Context makes no difference. There is always a better option. Hitting children is the recourse of the lazy and thoughtless. If you think you MUST physically discipline a child, it's because you haven't considered sufficiently many options and thought of something better. It is a failure of imagination on your part. DON'T DO IT.
Was kinda strange (and ineffective) at that age, but totally better than in school suspension.
I opted in for it twice (uniform code violations) over iss until my parents said no, he should go to iss, he's not learning his lesson lol.
As a kid I was spanked a few times, it was never that the spanking that hurt, just the fear of getting in trouble.
Conflating spanking with "hitting" seems disingenuous.
Personally some people I interact with today should have been spanked, or raised better in general.
And no I'm not talking about not violating dress codes etc, it's fine to break the rules if you're not hurting anyone. But there's a lot of bad people that would have benefitted from discipline.
Second, if you're coupling torture with a slap on the bum then maybe your world view is distorted.
I know you condone with physical abuse against children. It is way more than I want to know about you.
Your flagged and dead comment says others don't agree with your logic.
How can you define spanking without using a term like "hitting?"
> it's fine to break the rules *if you're not hurting anyone*
seems odd to have the person in authority return the favor by hurting the kids as punishment
You call it spanking, or slapping on the bum.
Hitting colloquially gives the impression of a closed-fist.
> seems odd to have the person in authority return the favor by hurting the kids as punishment
The world is not fair. You can pick and choose rules based on a moral code but things like dress code, drugs, etc. are the institutional rules and they have setup consequences, agree with them or not.
And if you're hurting the child you aren't spanking, you're beating.
Hitting does not imply closed fist.
It does for me and I'd assume many others, otherwise you'd use "slap".
Let's take a poll.
The words "fist" and "knuckle" do not even appear on M-W's definition of hit. "Fists" appears in a sample sentence that would be redundant if "hit" assumed "fists." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hit
when a baseball player gets slapped on the butt after a good run, would you say their teammate hit or struck them?
semantic debates are fun, how'd we get here? :)
this is circular logic
> Hitting colloquially gives the impression of a closed-fist.
it does not
> And if you're hurting the child you aren't spanking, you're beating.
what the hell is spanking then? you're not hitting the kid or hurting the kid apparently. is it just another term for a 'stern talking-to?'
Are you trying to get into a semantic debate because you don't want to do the philosophical one?
You're choosing words with a connotation you know are more extreme.
So you avoid basic words like slap and use a basic word like strike. For the connotation.
> Hitting colloquially gives the impression of a closed-fist.
You don't speak for all of society. So we're 1:1 right now. Let's take a poll.
When describing a fight, you see one person using open hand, one person using closed fist.
You wouldn't say one is slapping, one is hitting?
> what the hell is spanking then? you're not hitting the kid or hurting the kid apparently. is it just another term for a 'stern talking-to?'
It's the fear of the whole process. It's the next level after being sent into the corner or something.
Spanking is intentional hitting for the purpose of inflicting pain; your attempt to distinguish them is disingenuous.
It's the fear of getting in trouble, that's why spanking doesn't work in older ages.
You don't slap the the bum enough to hurt, it's the event and the getting in trouble that disciplines.
Speak for yourself. The night master at my prep school would ensure that you thought of it every time you sat down for the next week.
I don't disagree that there's people that beat children in the world, that's different entirely and should be condemned.
Spanking should not hurt the child, if it does you're beating them.
Spanking is no longer spanking when it inflicts pain.
Straight from wikipedia.
There is no punishment mechanism to spanking without pain. This sort of strange homeopathic idea of spanking is unrealistic and I'm unsure why you're trying to paint this false picture of the world - the vast majority of parents who spank do so with the intention of causing pain to discourage behaviour.
A light slap on the bum is entirely different and that's what I'm talking about.
Holding hands with an officer without permission would end you up in jail.
Grabbing an item from the officer without permission would end you up in jail.
You can do all of those things with your child that you can't with an officer.
Your analogy's logic breaks down easily.
(I don't condone police violence either; I'm laying out a positive argument, not a normative one.)
You ignored the breakdown of your analogy.
Just going to reiterate, if you're hurting your child you aren't spanking, you're beating.
The act of spanking is to strike the butt cheeks to inflict pain as a punishment, there is no other mechanic at play. It is striking another person to hurt them.
> It is striking another person to hurt them.
You added those parts. I said exactly the opposite.
There is another mechanic at play. The fear of getting in trouble and going through the process.
The light slap on the bum isn't even supposed to sting.
But I do agree we are at the limit of productive dialog, have a good day.
The hypocrisy is astounding and one of the worst aspects - behavior we've outlawed against adults are being outright advocated for children in a position where they can't reasonably defend themselves.
You're seeking to justify violence and abuse, no matter how you trivialise it.
Try to do anything to another adult with consent and you'll have criminal charges.
You can't ground another adult, or take away their stuff. You can with your child.
Also teammates slap each other on the bum all the time.
My ex took someone to court over an unwanted slap on the bum a while back, in case someone thinks this is hypothetic, as the CPS agreed it was a crime though they cautioned they'd have a hard time proving the case.
I responded to your other point elsewhere.
What you are doing is making violence acceptable with your conflation.
Try applying it to an adult without consent and see the criminal charges you'd face.
Again, what you're doing is conflating abuse and violence with discipline.
> Try applying it to an adult without consent and see the criminal charges you'd face.
Try to do anything to another adult with consent and you'll have criminal charges.
You can't ground another adult, or take away their stuff. You can with your child.
Try to do anything to another adult with consent and you'll have criminal charges.
> You can't ground another adult, or take away their stuff. You can with your child.
You can tell another adult they are grounded all you want. You just can't rely on physical violence to enforce it.
With respect to possessions, there's a stark difference between bodily autonomy and property.
That you're stretching to the point of comparing violence with taking away their stuff is disgusting.
The information is that it teaches violence is acceptable and people will unironically respond with something like "I was slapped as a kid and I'm not a person who thinks violence is acceptable... that's why I think slapping kids is okay".
If they then do see the irony they'll argue that their form of hitting the child is completely different from the bad form of hitting a child.
In the states that ban it (and the major cities in most of the states that don't), it's assault, of course.
Because assault statutes have an exception for lawful force, and the applicable laws (either statute or common law) provide a legal privilege.
> I presume in loco parentis is a defense?
Not a “defense”, but in some schemes it may be part of the legal basis. (In states where there is a parental option, this is clearly the case.)
> Is this something that is well tested by the courts in the places where this still takes place?
It is worth noting that most of the explicit rules prohibiting or regulating corporal punishment are the outcome of debate in the late 70s and into the 80s triggered by a 1977 US Supreme Court decision that found, in the absence of state law to the contrary, that corporal punishment in public schools was legal, even when contrary to the express wishes of parents.
Very few states had any explicit law on the issue prior to that point.
In the states that don't currently ban corporal punishments in schools, it's likely that the municipal centers of those states do. By way of example: this article had to focus on Union County MS, which is in the middle of nowhere even for Mississippi. Jackson is the municipal center of Mississippi, and it bans corporal punishment.
Where I am lost is that more general rules do not seem to apply. Adults cannot beat eachother without consent or ending up in criminal court. Teachers may be employed by the government, but I doubt they have the privileges of law enforcement. Rules of the schools are not even law (?!), probably closer to terms of service, which would make violations a matter of a civil court? Maybe because attending school isn't compulsory, attending voluntarily implies consent?
Personal experience: Every school I attended through 12th grade had corporal punishment in place. In 5th grade I was punished by a Catholic Nun who broke a ruler over my hands as they were laying flat on the desk. It was deserved and fixed the problem at hand and by example to the other students. (haha no pun intended). I actually have a fond memory of it now as they made my parents pay for the broken ruler. We laugh about it now and then. It happened again in HS and remember being scared shitless because it was being administered by a teacher with a good rep for painful swats. It solved the issues that time as well. Neither instance caused any psychological damage to me(that i’m aware of) and helped keep our learning environment a place where people can actually go to learn.
Corporal punishment is no longer practiced in my state. I would support it if it came back. It’s an effective tool.
So any form of self defense is abuse? I'm not sure you've thought this through. Trivializing complex issues is the kneejerk response for many, but there isn't a simple moral line of thinking that billions of people have overlooked.
It doesn't make it good; it makes it necessary, and for that reason we often consider it legitimate.
If an adult tried to assault my son, and he hit back, I wouldn't consider it good, but I would be proud he felt able to defend himself against a violent attacker. Even if that attacker was a teacher.
> > So any form of self defense is abuse?
> Yes, it's abusive
Abuse is a term used to describe impropriety of action. The idea that impropriety is used to counter impropriety is not coherent. Self-defense is proper (suitable, appropriate, etc) use of force, insofar as an individual values safety of their person. Self-defense is necessarily not abuse. I dont think any amount of rewording will change this.
If we restrict it to the impropriety of action, then I agree it does not apply to self defence, but that was not the meaning of my reply. I of course can't speak to the poster of the original statement, so if we interpret it as impropriety of action, I agree with you; in the broader sense allowed by the other dictionaries I stand by what I wrote.
If society creates an unsafe environment, then sometimes violence is necessary as a means to fight an abusive regime and cause change. That does not mean it's a nice thing - last resorts seldom are.
That you think I'm the "kinder, gentler" crowd is your mistake. I just don't like injustice, and punching down against someone unable to defend themselves is one of the worst forms of injustice.
Corporal punishment can be harmful to children and may lead to long-term negative outcomes, such as increased aggression, mental health problems, and poor academic performance.
That’s not to speak to who’s enforcing it and on who.
Also, there are legal and cultural definitions of child abuse and, at least where I'm from, corporeal punishment isn't necessarily abusive.
What!
For example, it's easy to make the argument that time-out, a common negative reinforcement strategy among parents, constitutes emotional mistreatment. After all it is just a form of solitary confident, and solitary is known for how it emotionally wrecks adults.
What you're telling people is that assault by the state against children is acceptable.
I got smacked, but in a way that was traumatizing(?) as I remember every second of it decades later. Still, it did actually encourage me to improve the thing I got smacked about and probably led to me being as successful as I am (such as it were.)
George Orwell would love this New Speak of yours, for he was also subject to such "physical discipline" and had no fond memories of it.
It doesn't change that it is harmful abuse. I'm sorry you were subjected to that kind of abuse, even though you believe it was justified.
There's nothing to suggest it serves a legitimate purpose.
Well there's nothing if you disregard personal testimony as stockholm syndrome.
I don’t disregard anything as Stockholm Syndrome, since that doesn’t exist.
However, I do disregard anecdotal conclusory testimony about causative processes, as a general rule. I’ll accept testimony about facts plausibly within the knowledge of the person testifying as being (barring special reason for suspicion on those points) as trustworthy as the person testifying.
No, I disregard anecdote to the extent it makes claims which are conclusory rather than observational.
I weight anecdote very lightly in any case, though.
Well nothing except my personal experience which you clearly disregarded by categorizing me without any evidence as a victim of violence nor do I see this as abuse(obviously).
No offense taken by the comment btw I just don’t believe you are correct in your attempt to analyze my particular situation.
You literally describe the violence you were targeted with.
Your personal view that this violence was justified and is part of a beneficial pattern of violence does not negate that it is violence.
If there were data showing improved outcomes among this group compared to those not subjected to violence, there'd be reason to listen to their accounts, but since there isn't independent evidence to support these claims, and it's not a controlled sample, their anecdotes have little value.
My own memory is of the time I wasn't hit. I was in elementary school. The principal was out shoveling snow off of the sidewalk where it crossed a driveway. I was out on recess, and I hit her with a snowball. She didn't hit me, though school policy allowed it at the time. Instead, she just had me shovel the snow. (Duh... what did I think was going to happen?)
Hitting a child to teach them could be better than some alternatives. But it's definitely not the best approach. It seems like an option for those without any idea on what else to do.
I am also pretty sure that if violence is the only thing you respect, it's the only lever others have
Said no modern, respectable scientist who has studied the phenomenon within the last thirty years.
...said some guy on a forum.
From 2006: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-1284596.pdf
https://www.unmc.edu/newsroom/2002/06/28/dr-larzelere-featur... - "There is general consensus that corporal punishment is effective in getting children to comply immediately while at the same time there is caution from child abuse researchers that corporal punishment by its nature can escalate into physical maltreatment," - E. T. Gershoff
The meta-analysis study that "decided things" in 2021: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34197808/
A critique to that point in 2022: A Response to Heilmann et al.’s (2021) Narrative Review - https://psyarxiv.com/5xbnm/download?format=pdf
Much like Abraham Wald pointed out in WWII, many studies are unintentionally magnifying the statistical outliers incorrectly. As Greg Wilson once said - (summarized) Gender inequity in science being biologically gender influenced is settled as false. The efficacy of corporal punishment is a scottish verdict.
The efficacy and/or benefit of corporal punishment, is undecided.
The last link you provided is a methodological critique of another study, and its authors are of questionable authority (for instance, a dev psych professor at a private Christian college).
Gershoff's contributions to the debate are not a singular paper.
https://www.unmc.edu/newsroom/2002/06/28/dr-larzelere-featur... includes a response from Robert E. Larzelere, Ph.D., which quotes Gershoff as the source of the quote referenced.
Or maybe, just maybe, go the other way and treat kids like people and avoid teaching them that abuse is normal.
Violence is the second most effective form of persuasion known to man, following shame.
We do use violence in limited fashion, around the world, today. In some societies, unmitigated violence was acceptable for a time. Why is it always curtailed? Unequivocally, murder is more effective at achieving settlement in many disputes. Expediency is not the only concern. Society is built on maintained relationships and mutual agreements, not wanton acts of passion to form networks that are more effective and stable than the individual.
Children are not considered fully informed or stable. Shame is difficult to instill, when there is no preconceived notion of social acceptance. Violence is the natural fallback. Is picking up a child and moving them out of the way of a vehicle, when they don't want to be moved, violence? No. Violence isn't simply an action, but the act and intention and efficacy. Modern societies have balanced these concerns for adults and children. Self-defense and purposeful administrative allowances for violence (police, army) are the norm.
The question of what the limits of perceived violence for children is optimal, is still debated.
What does? citation obv
A quick, preemptive edit:
If you take the time to get the ranked list of journals in developmental psychology and then search for this question in those journals, you'll find the consensus gets significantly stronger. As you've already shown us, if you instead go the other direction, and find un-reviewed papers co-authored by professors at private Christian colleges, you can find counterexamples.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/21/04/effect-spanking-br... - This study determines that spanking (as well as other stimuli, like observed violence) may influence behavior negatively. This is used as justification to determine that spanking is detrimental. The study does not expand this to corporal punishment overall, state sponsored or otherwise.
https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/pfricklab/wp-content/uploads... - This had 98 subjects recruited from two school systems in the southeastern United States.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447048/ - This is basically a narrative summary of some existing studies, leaning heavily on -
* https://www.repeal43.org/docs/CP%20research%20US%20Nov%2012....
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5094178/pdf/nih...
* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261705604_The_effec...
Getting access to papers directly is often troublesome, so there may be an additional step of clicking on a link to get the PDF. 2/3 of these papers focus on effects of pre-school corporal punishment (ages 2-6) exclusively, which is hard to correlate to the topic but provides solid evidence that corporal punishment (without qualification) for infants correlates to behavioral problems.
I would not agree that there is consensus nor is there conclusive data in regard to corporal punishment in schools (post-preschool). This is not an issue of convenience, but has large social implications. If you could provide something a bit more compelling, I'm open to it. I don't have a vested interest, other than a higher standard of proof, such that I can defend conclusive evidence.
I claim undecided.
You claim "broad consensus", for some value of broad that you have curated from sources...at least nothing beyond what I've cited.
I don't think anything has changed. GL
The greatest generation that built this country into what it is were subject to corporal punishment. Today, Asian immigrants use corporal punishment and their kids vastly outperform the children of native born Americans. Maybe there is no correlation between those things, but that is much more concrete evidence than some papers in a psychology journal.
As my sibling commenter notes, we have a neat little case study here, too: we allow corporal punishment in public schools in a minority of states. Overlay outcomes by school district; how's it working out?
We don't
So in the absence of any evidence that corporal punishment works, the obvious answer should be to not do it.
That you seek to compare abuse with saving a child from being hit by a vehicle is a astonishing. We recognises the necessity of physical contact that would sometimes be unlawful when that contact is necessary all the time, irrespective of age.
This attempt at acting as if this has anything to do with children's age or development in order to allow it to be used to justify abuse of children that'd be a crime when carried out against adults fails in that basis: we know how to recognise the difference.
Yet somehow we are told to accept violence against children we're not ourselves willing to be subjected to.
I don't know what "healthy attitude to violence" is when there's a disagreement by what "violence" means. So I'll have to await some clarification, other than simply sharing your unspecified views. Police carry weapons in modern societies across the globe. Claiming violence does not produce lasting compliance is an interesting belief that is not shared by the majority of the world, so I find this claim uncompelling. There are exceptions ofc, like Japan, where a large part of the peacekeeping force patrols without weapons. While it is effective at times, the lack of efficacy can also be seen on Youtube.
> That you seek to compare abuse with saving a child from being hit by a vehicle is a astonishing
I did not compare them directly. I illustrated the use of the term "violence" is overly broad, as unconsented forceful action is not unwarranted. The question is degree, intent, and efficacy, as stated. Please don't misrepresent my statements. You are imagining I meant "abuse", which is another broad term that is dishonestly equated to "corporal punishment" or "violence". I have trouble teasing out what you specifically trying to communicate, other than a strong disdain for corporal punishment without qualification.
It's a belief that is backed by the total absence of evidence of a lasting effect on compliance from the use of violence. That societies continue to condone the use of violence despite the total lack of anything to suggest it works speaks to the pathology of the political process, not to the efficacy of violence.
There are situations where violence becomes necessary, such as self-defence or a defensive war, as a means to achieve short term compliance absent other alternatives, but anyone who believes in a beneficial long term effect on compliance is a fool.
Fixed it for you.
Here's the basic problem:
- Most punishments for kids outside of mainstream cultural norms are harmful
- Most punishments in anger are harmful
Living within that context, I don't use corporal punishment, and I think it would be harmful to my child. However, I am not at all ready to generalize the results to outside of that context.
Another way I'd frame it: The research evidence is at the level where I'm glad to call it a best practice (which I follow), and encourage others to do so. It's not yet at the level where I'm ready to judge people -- especially in other cultures -- who don't.
I suspect a thorough investigation of the African Americans beaten in the streets by cops would find that being beaten by their parents as a child is not substantial protection against being beaten in the streets by cops.
Its a convenient rationalization, though.
We have an unfortunate history where investigations OF African Americans BY white Americans led to not only incorrect but also very unfortunate conclusions.
> Neither instance caused any psychological damage
Really now? I would consider acute fear to be, at the very least, psychologically detrimental, if not to you then to the vast majority of people. Generally, fear is not conducive to a healthy learning environment.
a) that corporal punishment is the only or only effective way to ensure nobody or at least less students have to fear other peers b) corporal punishment is any effective at all c) the necessity to fear some peers has a strong connection to whether they are 'controllable'
All three claims seem to be disputed.
Parents are notoriously shitty people.
I have at least 2 memories where I have been spanked really hard from my parents due to being misunderstood. What's the consequence of that? Who is going to punish the parent? In children's view, that's a major punishment for no correct reason, what does it teaches about law?
There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25. You can’t reason with kids. There is a place for physical consequences that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities.
The move to ban corporal punishment doesn’t seem to have produced equally effective alternatives. At least from my experience in America, it seems like parents just simply put up with poorly behaved kids. It’s a sort of luxury belief. In a subsistence economy you need kids to behave because mistakes can be fatal. In rich country, you can put up with poorly behaved kids because you just have so much margin.
I'm sure your kids will be fine; they have lots going for them.
One, this seems to rely on GSS data, which is conducted only in English and Spanish. Just 44% of for example foreign born Chinese Americans are proficient in English. So the GSS data is going to heavily skew towards assimilated, affluent Asians.
Two, the survey question is idiomatic English. It refers to a “good hard spanking.” I don’t think any of my immigrant family would say they do that to their kids, even they do use physical discipline. Non-native English speakers are going to be much less likely to understand what “hard” (or even “spanking”) means in this context.
Three, the survey is of Asian Americans, not immigrants. A survey of Latinos showed that the percentage that use corporal punishment drops dramatically in the second generation. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true for Asian Americans also. But by the second generation, Asians enjoy no advantages in outcomes relative to other native born Americans.
Apart from that, even Asians who don’t use physical punishment use “socio emotive” discipline that people in this thread would deem emotional abuse: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/10/02/why-asian-a...
What’s your standard for “fine?” It’s shocking how hard it is to keep kids from sopping up the worst aspects of American culture. Unfortunately I think there’s a good chance that one of the three will end up childless, unmarried, or divorced. Where I’m from I would have a reasonable expectation that none of those three would happen.
And, of course, the other half of the argument is hard to knock down: incidence of corporal punishment clearly doesn't track good economic outcomes. The opposite is much closer to the truth; it probably is the truth, for in part mechanistic reasons (hitting kids damages them, impedes their ability to succeed).
Sorry meant to link this Reddit thread the first time: https://www.reddit.com/r/asiantwoX/comments/2ibwkq/why_asian...
> "Asian" is more than half the world's population; the "model minority" thing is problematic in part because lots of Asian families have poor socioeconomic outcomes in the US. But the cohort captured by the study overlaps pretty completely the cohort of children you're implying have unusually good outcomes.
Closer to the opposite is true. Well assimilated second and third generation Asians don’t do any better than similarly affluent white Americans. It’s the kids of poor Asians—children of Indian gas station owners or Chinese restaurant workers, etc.—that have unusual outcomes. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are 2.5x more likely to end up in the top 20% as comparably situated white kids: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y....
It’s true that the “model minority” label is misleading as applied to Chinese or Indian people who come here under H1B to work at Google. The fact that those people do well is just filtering. But don’t forget that the American immigration system is one of chain migration. Those immigrants bring over family who often aren’t affluent. But the kids of those people also tend to do very well. And then there are the myriad groups who mostly didn’t come to America through systems like H1B that filter for educated, affluent people. The poverty rate among Vietnamese, who came here as refugees, in 1980 was higher than among black people. Today the median household income of US-born Vietnamese is significantly higher than for white Americans. The same is true for Filipinos.
My point is that when you allude to the academic success of Asian American families, you are discussing exactly the cohort that thread complains is overindexed in the study. The study (and the thread) support my argument, and gravely undermine yours.
Hitting children is not a good way to improve academic outcomes. All the evidence we have right now suggests that, at best, it does nothing; at worst, it damages children and leads to markedly worse outcomes.
Grounding and taking away their computer is a physical consequence that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities. It's not clear to me why their still-developing brains would be an argument for inflicting violence on them. Is there any level at all of physical abuse you couldn't support with this logic?
> In rich country, you can put up with poorly behaved kids because you just have so much margin.
A self-sustaining long-term advantage.
> A self-sustaining long-term advantage.
The empirical evidence is the opposite: developed countries became rich under one kind of culture, and due to social changes in the last half century their social capital is crumbling. On myriad indicators, from loneliness to birth rates to social trust, these countries are on an unsustainable path. Literally: they have been reduced to importing people from countries with “backwards” (but perhaps, if we are honest, more viable) cultures.
How exactly is this a rational argument? You're essentially arguing in favor of corporal punishment against people until the age of 25, since you stated that a 'human brain isn't fully developed until 25' and 'you can't reason with kids'. Do you believe that college students should also be beaten by their professors for being disruptive?
And in comparison it's common knowledge that the worst way to train animals is through violence. We can reason even less with a dog or a cat than we can a teenage individual, but in your view it's rational to punish kids with violence but doing the same to an animal is abuse.
I can tell you though that getting hit didn't teach me anything useful at all. Certainly not about reason. It taught me that when reason fails you just rely on your temper. We weren't "corrected" by the punishment in a long term sense, both of my brothers and I just emulated it (to varying degrees).
If you have boys, be careful about modeling physical aggression for them as a norm. You might, say, hit the oldest one as punishment and then weeks later the younger one somehow has a broken arm. Or something happens at school.
We weren't exposed to the world that my dad was growing up in WWII China -- an occupying army, nearby factories blowing up, etc. That doesn't make it a luxury belief that you shouldn't hit your kids. There are consequences to it that go beyond the lessons you want to teach them.
And if effectiveness were the only criterion against which to judge an act, then maybe one would be justified in supporting violence and threats of violence against children. (Although even there, in aggregate, I’m skeptical that corporal punishment is effective.) But in any case, not all effective actions are morally sound.
Stressing this out is enough of a reply.
But my mother told me once, that when she was in school her teacher was fixated at one girl and did beat her often and mostly for no good reason. The girl was from a poor family, and my mother was upset by the unjustice, but never spoke up, IIRC.
So YMMV.
At the end, I think such occasional injustice is the lesser evil compared to the sheepish society and nanny states that are the consequence of the pathetic antiviolent decadence we have nowadays in most of the nation states.
Care to elaborate?
The antiviolence should be clear reading the most comments to the original post. Denying the violent part of the nature of the monkey horde Homo sapiens is pathetic. And that in all industrialised nations - if not in all else as well-, throw-away society and obscene consumerism are the dominant hype should be obvious.
What the fuck kind of shitty human being is this? Can you even imagine doing that? Putting someone’s hands flat on a desk and hitting as hard as you can with a ruler? That’s some next level twisted psychopathic shit here.
> I actually have a fond memory of it now
There’s your psychological damage. That’s not a normal reaction, even years after.
> It was deserved and fixed the problem at hand and by example to the other students
2 questions for you:
- did it fix anything? Did you learn a lesson or were you just scared of getting caught? I guarantee the only lesson other students learned was « don’t get caught »
- assuming it fixed the issue somehow, was physical abuse the only way to do that?
This feels like state sponsored child abuse. When does the federal government intervine?
No, they couldn’t; in every one of those states (and many where corporal punishment in schools is prohibited) corporal punishment by parents or guardians is permitted.
> This feels like state sponsored child abuse.
It is.
> When does the federal government intervine?
It has very little authority to, excepy perhaps via funding mandates for schools. Were children considered a suspect class under the 14th Amendment (they seem to meet the usual test, but have not been so recognized), arguably the enforcement clause of the 14th Amendment might give a basis.
Practically speaking, 19 states is almost enough, alone, to block Congressional action via a Senate filibuster, so even if there was a Constitutional basis, federal action would be difficult.
It doesn’t sting to be wrong, but the reality makes me feel like shit.