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Spanking at School
The disciplinary hitting of students in the United States typically involves battering the buttocks with a flat stick or board called a paddle. Currently, the practice is legal in 21 states. It should be understood that hitting a schoolchild — or “paddling,” as it is typically called — is not the only method for inflicting pain. Forced exercise, denial of use of the bathroom, for instance, are commonly used as forms of corporal punishment. But paddling, because it is specifically allowed and so blatant, serves as a smokescreen for a wide variety of less obvious forms of abusive treatment.
Users and defenders of corporal punishment typically rationalize that educators' recourse to corporal punishment guarantees the smooth functioning of the school. Were that true, schools that are the most punitive would be the highest performing, children who are routinely punished would be the best behaved, and teachers’ colleges would teach paddling. In fact, school systems with the highest rates of corporal punishment are the worst-performing, children who are the most punished are the most troubled and difficult to manage, and there is not one accredited college in the United States that instructs future educators in the proper method for hitting children. When researcher John Guthrow examined correlations between school corporal punishment and certain negative social outcomes, he found that states that have the highest rates of school paddling also have the lowest graduation rates, the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest incarceration rates and the highest murder rates.
The use of corporal punishment in schools also has a demoralizing effect on teachers who don't condone the practice. They have difficulty working alongside paddlers. Their survival in such an environment depends on their willingness to remain silent about what they witness. They know that paddlers feel threatened by their very presence. It’s not unusual for a paddling school to degenerate to a level where it is nothing more than a magnet and safe haven for incompetent teachers, including some who are dangerously unfit to be left in charge of children. Teachers who favor a power-based management style, including the use of corporal punishment, sometimes rise to positions of authority where they set a bad standard for everyone under their control and influence. A teacher recounts this experience when he applied for a position in such a place:
“The interview began with the director asking me how I felt about corporal punishment. I told him that I disapproved of it and that I couldn’t and wouldn’t do it. He replied, ‘Well, since that’s the way you feel, you’re of no use to us here,’ and the interview was over.”
There is one aspect of corporal punishment which is rarely mentioned, but should be: its sexual side. Some people experience a profound psychological need to dominate a defenseless victim, including the need to inflict terror and pain by beating. This compulsion probably has its origin in their own early experience of cruelty at some critical stage of their development. Such people have been known to seek employment in paddling schools because those places give them free rein to indulge this perverse appetite. In an apparent attempt to guard against such impropriety, many schools require that paddling be done in the presence of a witness. But no one has ever explained what the witness is supposed to be witnessing or preventing, and there is nothing to prevent the paddler and the witness from being accomplices in an act of sexual battery. Team paddling only protects the adult perpetrators and their employer, not the child. For the child, who is a non-consenting, unequal party in the act, stimulation of the buttocks, painful or otherwise, is also sexual. It’s a felony when done to an unwilling adult.
In light of these dangers, why is corporal punishment of schoolchildren still legal in 21 states? Why is it even applauded and encouraged in some circles? The answer isn’t complicated. People who hit children find affirmation in the fact that some professional educators do it too. “After all,” they reason, “if the schools spank, what can be so wrong?” This mutual reinforcement among child abusers calms doubts and assuages troubled consciences. One hand washes the other.
School corporal punishment has disappeared nearly everywhere in the developed world. Not one country in Europe permits it, and abolition is spreading at a rapid pace among developing nations. Virtually nowhere is there any movement within governments or among educators to reverse this trend and return to the old ways. Only one country on record temporarily revoked its prohibition against hitting students: Germany during the Nazi era. Meanwhile, the United States remains stalled in this regard with between 1/3 and 1/2 million school beatings per year.
What should enlightened, responsible parents do about corporal punishment in their schools? If you knew that a school bus had bald tires and faulty brakes, you would not let your child ride that bus, and you would demand that your school authorities correct the problem immediately. If you knew that the air ducts in your school were contaminated with asbestos and the classrooms were painted with lead-based paint, you’d remove your child immediately and alert other parents to the danger. Corporal punishment is no different. It is very dangerous, and all sensible people in the community should unite in opposition to it.
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*Copyright © Jordan Riak, Exec. Dir. of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (PTAVE). Please visit their website, Project NoSpank, for more information. Reprinted with permission.
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