Corporal Punishment

Branden just read me piece of an article about corporal punishment in Europe. It seems that in much of Europe it is illegal in both schools and homes. Other parts of Europe it is illegal in schools only but in the Czech Republic it isn't illegal anywhere. Yep. I told him that when we lived in Oklahoma the schools practiced corporal punishment. For me, it was a VERY good deterrent. I wasn't a trouble maker, but the thought of swats certainly helped me continue to stay out of trouble. For some kids, it was nothing and didn't make any difference at all. Honestly, most of the kids who got punished really seemed to deserve it!

At first he didn't believe me. Then he said that it HAD to be illegal now. "No, I don't think so. I mean, maybe it's been banned in the last ten years but it seems unlikely."

"There's no WAY they're still allowed to hit kids! You mean the teachers could just walk up and smack you and noone has had a problem with this?"

"Oh, no. You had to go out into the hall, bend over, grab your ankles and then the teacher paddled your butt with a wooden paddle. They called it 'getting swats' and you generally got three swats at a time. I never had it happen to me but I knew plenty of kids who did."

I proceeded to tell him stories about kids who received swats at the hand of the tennis-playing science teacher and from our seven-foot tall principal, Mr. Flood. I told him about my friend's mom who signed up to be a substitute teacher and was given a paddle and a piece of carpet on which to practice. I giggled my way through the stories because, as before stated, I never did anything that warranted going out in the hall like that. I was an angel... Or at least angelic enough to only ever get papers with 3, 6 or 9 pages and the VERY rare time spent in detention.

He couldn't believe that this could have happened only a decade ago. So he looked it up. As it turns out, 21 out if 50 states still allow corporal punishment in schools. Most of them are Southern and Missouri is one of them. I'm not at all surprised! Ohio is the only one that legally requires the schools to listen when parents tell them not to use corporal punishment.

Branden said that if a teacher had ever given him swats he would have punched him/her. I told him that his actions could legally be called assault as the teacher did, in fact, have a legal right to give him the punishment. Let's just say, that didn't go over well. Now he thinks that we will have a sit-down with the principal and tell them not to hit our kid or there will be problems. I said maybe we should just teach our kid to not act out in class! I'm not terribly worried when it comes down to it. Just because they are ALLOWED to spank a child, doesn't mean that every school district in those 21 states practices corporal punishment.

Mostly, I'm amused that so many people think that we no longer practice corporal punishment in the US and that they are shocked by my stories. For all our advancement in science, etc., we are not as civilized as we like to think.