Halls no longer alive with the sound of thwacking

It’s still legal to paddle public schoolkids in Kansas and 21 other states. But to its credit, Kansas at least uses the punishment sparingly. New U.S. Education Department data indicates that 46 Kansas kids were spanked in the 2002-03 school year. Leading the nation was — why is this no surprise? — Texas, accounting for 57,000 of the 301,000 student paddlings nationally that year. The only thing more shocking than those last two numbers is the fact that corporal punishment remains accepted at all.
Posted by Rhonda Holman

4 Comments

  1. writerdog
    Posted December 5, 2005 at 2:37 am | Permalink

    The problem is that the majority of school punishments are ineffective. To a kid, you know they do not think like an adult!When you say that you are suspended for three days. They heard you get to go to Disneyland. There is no thought, “Oh my parnents are going to kill me!”.

    The paddle has been used in wrong cases and sometimes too freely.But it is a punishment that a child understand. I sure did and to my recall the three years in Jr. high. There were only ten kids ever got the paddle. But every kid feared it. That does say something of the punishment.

  2. Damoon
    Posted December 5, 2005 at 9:23 am | Permalink

    I was taught by nuns, even though I never saw anyone get a beating, we were all scared death to break any rule. They were sort of like police officers in black robes, with that quiet, total authority that you didn’t dare challege for fear of being stuck dead by God.I don’t think it’s necessary to hit a kid in order to make him behave, there are more effective ways to discipline, bring back the nuns!

  3. Ray Thomas
    Posted December 5, 2005 at 2:34 pm | Permalink

    Although I do not pretend to have the answers to a vast socio-economic problem, it appears that the problems of discipline at schools has a lot more to it than lack of corporal punishment.

    The first two posts mentioned kids being scared of retribution. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Parents are overprotective (my child would NEVER do that), teachers are terrified of lawsuits, and the kids know they can get away with just about anything.

    Wish I had an answer..I just know my hat is off to our teachers, they have a very, very difficult job, get low pay and very little respect. Bless em, they are doing a job I certainly could never do.

  4. k
    Posted December 5, 2005 at 6:38 pm | Permalink

    If parents would take responsiblity for raising their children things like this would be very rare. Instead (most) parents believe it is the schools responsibility to teach manners and discipline. There was a study done about a decade ago and something like 65% or 70% of parents thought teaching discipline to their kids was the schools job (I remmeber the study, I just can’t find it). It seems to me that parents today want to be best friends with their kids and not parents. They had them, feed them, house them, let somebody else raise them.