Comment by quiet35
1 day ago
I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:
- it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable. And work with bullies to resolve/ease their life issues. I suspect most of them do what they do because of tough situation in family. In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation. Probably way better than showing ALL kids that violence is a fine casual way to solve issues.
Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.
Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.
My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.
Looking back it's not the physical bullying that was the most damaging, but social. I went to a different middle school and without a support network it was difficult to say the least.
> I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying
I don't think anyone is making that assumption, but being ok with corporal punishment likely comes down to three things:
1. We should care more about victims of violence than perpetrators, and all measures should be taken to protect victims and prevent victimization, even if it hurts perpetrators. Meaningful consequences for violent behaviour is critical.
2. The belief the physical deterrents work, if applied consistently and not abused to the point where it doesn't provide clear guidance as to acceptable behaviour.
3. That the primary job of schools and educators is to provide a safe and effective learning environment. Being therapists that get to the root of problematic behaviour is neither in their training nor in their job description.
1 reply →
Violence is not binary. A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven! Caning people for mistakes humiliates them, and creates in them, the desire for vengeance. Violence at that level, breeds violence. They will hit their children, who will hit their children in turn, and on and on it goes. This is also proven!
I say, remove the naughty children and put them in work/vocational training. Life will punish them enough, later on, if they do not change their ways.
Another way is to punish the parents of naughty children. They are, ultimately, responsible, and if they raised bullies, they should be punished.
Beat up their dad
As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.
I think the issue lies in your conflating caning and other forms of corporal punishment with physical harm. It is not the same as hitting a student or throwing a bottle at someone; it can be done very humanely. Sure, abuse is inevitable, and I could point to many teachers who were terrible and took out their issues on students, but such cases were easily resolved by reporting them to the principal or bringing parents to school the next day to file a complaint.
In
> such cases were easily resolved
Hah!
In any case, it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people.
> it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people
Not curious at all. Ingrains the lesson that, should you feel inclined to abuse your strength, there is always someone stronger. That's a clear lesson that even works on psychopaths who otherwise feel no remorse and cannot be influenced by other means.
Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.
We'd watch Hollywood movies and be bewildered by the misbehavior and lack of respect shown to teachers in classrooms.
Every class has square pegs, but with strict teachers, they'd stay in line and not ruin the learning environment for the rest of the class.
Part way through high school, corporal punishment by teachers was banned nationwide, with only the headteacher allowed to administer that punishment. Since then I believe not even headteachers are permitted to strike students.
Might have been as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Schools have gone downhill since.
> - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and can be just as bad bullies as the other students. They should be able to strike my kid with "trust me bro" as proof that she did wrong? No fucking way on Earth.
Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.
What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?
Violence as punishment is different, of course.
This comment implies that you’d okay with your child being beaten if there are strong evidence against him?
In theoretical land - if my son had beaten some other kid to pulp, and he got a slap from teacher to stop that (on top of probably being expelled)? Absolutely, the least of the issues in such problem.
This is very far from organized canning as a punishment, but stating teacher should never ever use violence or they end up losing their job for good and getting dragged to courts with possibility of jail is just as extreme position as letting them be beaten at teacher's will.
Middle path folks, middle path. If you don't trust teachers at all in the first place, why do you give them your children to co-raise them? Schools should do procedural punishments, not corporal. But 100% is a fairy land, and some psychotic parents who never admit their child is doing something bad (and there are so many of those, aren't they just ask literally any teacher) take it as a gospel and go to jihad mode against anybody. World doesn't need more empowered Karens, do we.
There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.
Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.
The notion that people train to be teachers followed by spending ~10 years in the system holding out for the chance to be a headmaster just so that they can beat people is a stretch.
Bound to be one or two, but there are surely better paths for a sadist - prison guard, et al.
Give this a watch - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2070649/
> it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the idea to straighten yourself out, because there's always someone with a bigger stick.
> In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation.
In my experience, this isn't the deterrent you think it is.
Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.
The only thing that unites bullies is the willingness to inflict misery on others. A bully could be a simple thug who uses violence because they have nothing else going for them, or a popular kid at the top of their class who manipulates others for their own amusement.
> Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
When I was young me and two of my brothers were one-day really misbehaving. My grand-father, who had been capture on the first day of WWII (well on the first day Germany invaded Belgium) and spent 5 years in a PoW prisoner camp in Germany, wasn't a little wuss.
He spanked our three arses so bad I remember it to this day.
It was an amazing lesson.
Something has to be said about peaceful time that create weak men who then find all the excuses towards abusers. The issue with the "well-thinking" mindset is that when pushed to its logical end, rapists are walking totally free after having been caught (UK) and people can break a female police officer' nose at the London Heathrow airport and walk totally free too. With weak judges from a weak society ruling that: "In their culture/countries men don't know that you're not supposed to rape women".
We then end up with people, in the west, who genitally mutilate women and non-sense like that.
When, on the contrary, you decide to take the psychopaths who ruin society for everyone by the scruff of the neck and put them in chain, you get the homicide rate slashed, in ten years by 100.
That's not being decimated: that's being decimated and then being decimated, again.
1/100th.
> So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable
That's typical victimization, which create more weak men. Weak men who then, for example, become politicians who vote ultra-lax laws and weak judges who then let rapists walk free, making the streets unsafe.
If bullies getting spanked by an authority figure don't get the lesson, it's their problem. Not society's problem. Society, as a whole, is supposed to have the monopoly of violence. Instead of that in many countries (like France and the UK), the government gives up and gives the monopoly of violence to drug dealers and rapists. Drug dealers and rapists who learned, since a young age, that were exactly zero repercussion when being a bully.
You've got your opinion, I got mine: putting gang members in chains in El Salvador slashed the homicide rate by 100x. Ponder that.
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