OK, now the question makes more sense, with the context.
Well, I went to a grade school that used corporal punishment in theory, although rather rarely by the time I went there, and my kids went to schools that would not dream of using corporal punishment. I also know many older people who went to school when corporal punishment was very common and severe (hitting with flat wooden sticks across the backs of one’s outstretched hands–OUCH!!!)
First off, if the school is a parish school, there is a HUGE problem with having clergy or members of religious communities dish out beatings. People equate the beatings with the Church, and I personally know people who left the Church and have a lot of animosity for it because some sister used to hit them in school. So if your child goes to a parish school, there really needs to be a way to make disciples without beating anybody.
More to the point, though, it is very possible to have a school that is both disciplined and kind. I have seen it, and I have seen it even in a secular setting where there was not a shared religion. What does this require? First, the parents have to support the teachers. If the parents undermine or disbelieve the teachers when they say that the parents’ little darlings have been misbehaving, instead of giving the student the feeling that there are united expectations about his or her behavior that will have repercussions for 7 days a week and 24 hours of their days, the student comes to school feeling aggrieved for being expected to act in a decent manner. Secondly, though, the class size needs to be small enough (and conversely, the staff size large enough) and the teachers need ways to give natural consequences for both good and bad behavior, such as rewarding children with a good record and denying the children from activities they want to do when they don’t behave.
Third, there is not a way to run a school so that no one does anything wrong and everyone is at ease and free to learn. You’re either going to have somebody pushing the boundaries or else you’re going to have someone else living in terror that they’re going to get a punishment. This is the normal range of humanity, and I defy anybody to find an exception. The goal, instead, is to keep the bad behavior from unduly disrupting learning. If the teacher takes it too personally that they ought to expect to have to enforce discipline, instead of just getting it because they are so feared, then this method won’t work. The teacher (and parents) have to expect occasional bad behavior and have a plan for dealing with it in a calm, matter-of-fact manner.
So, if people protest that in America there are classrooms that are totally out of control, the first questions to ask are 1) Are the parents on-board with expecting their children to behave and 2) Are the class sizes too large to control them with anything short of terror tactics? If you don’t have parental support and enough teachers, you will not have a good school, even if you have a school that is in some sense “under control.” No one builds schools to control students, after all. They build schools to educate students. Education and learning go better when the students are not living in fear, when they have a positive relationship with their teacher and live in respect for them, rather than living in fear of them.
I would note that the beatings that you showed were done in front of the other students, and in an almost ritual fashion. Those weren’t just for the offender. Those were meant to “teach” the students forced to witness the beatings. Ask people to think about that. If they had to witness beatings as children, I think they’ll have a reaction.
That’s my experience. You do have to have ways of enforcing negative natural consequences, though. If there are no consequences for disrupting everything that the rest of the class wants to do, then somebody will have to do it, just to get the center of attention. Those who disrupt have to be pushed out of the center of attention into a very boring situation that will net them no admiration and no attention, those who comply need to get the best situation, and these consequences need to be predictable and consistently applied.
:nope:
