It seems so obvious I almost can’t believe it has become an issue - spanking children as a form of punishment in schools needs to be shelved.

We live in a violent society here in the United States. Our murder rates consistently top those in the industrialized world. Rapes, assaults and all forms of physical and sexual abuse are also off the scale. We are failing miserably at teaching our children respect for many things, even life itself.

So when I read in the Haywood County newspaper about a couple of children being spanked at school and the controversies that erupted due to those spankings, I was dumbfounded. Is this really the first year of the new millennium?

I don’t pretend to know all the facts in this case, don’t know anything about the relationship between the children involved and their parents, about how much of a discipline problem the children had been at school. What I do know is that as long as schools continue to use paddles to spank children, the entire teaching profession will have a hard time attaining the status of professionals that they so clearly desire.
Let’s not quibble about the need to be stern in disciplining children or try to turn this into some political argument of conservatives versus liberals. Perhaps more than ever, we are a society guilty of spoiling children and letting them get away with behavior that in the past would have been intolerable. Arguing against corporal punishment in schools should not be equated with accepting rude or indecent behavior either at home or in school.

But how can we teach children to be nonviolent in a violent society if spanking them is the ultimate form of punishment for misbehaving in school? By using corporal punishment, we are reducing the relationship between two people to its lowest, basest level. That child comes away learning many things, among them that those in power earn the right to inflict physical punishment.

In effect, spanking a child is the same as throwing in the towel. It means giving up on using psychology, experience and education to try and modify behavior. Instead, we’re just going to punish without hope that we can actually teach something positive.

I’m not going to argue the merits of spanking by parents, but I think even that is outdated. My mom and her flip-flop - and the threat of it against my bottom - were an amazingly efficient form of behavior control on my brothers and me, and a couple of whippings from my father taught me a few things about who was in charge. But I also believe that in the last few decades society has changed so significantly that if my parents were raising children today they would have discarded spanking as a form of discipline.

In fact, it seems that instead of schools taking part in this kind of behavior, something altogether different might become the norm. Schools should be the very places where parents who resort to beating children might learn that there are better ways to achieve the same end. And there are always better ways, no matter what anyone says.

Last week I called around to several school systems. I was surprised that Jackson is the only county of the four we cover - Haywood, Swain, Macon and Jackson - which has passed a school board resolution doing away with corporal punishment. I haven’t heard about any huge discipline problems in that system. In fact, the truth is that we never hear about corporal punishment unless a problem occurs. It’s almost as if administrators, principals and teachers who still use spankings consider it a dirty little secret they don’t much want to talk about.

There is a huge difference between home and school, between the way a parent disciplines and raises a child and the way schools must deal with students. In this day and in this culture, we ask a lot of educators. Let’s not ask them to hand out spankings to children. That will quickly undo so much of what we are trying to achieve.

(McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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