Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 11, 2012 Letters
Dear Editor,
I’ve just read an article in your letter pages (KN, Oct.10) by one B. Shivdas entitled “The contradictions of Corporal Punishment.”I really don’t think the writer has wrapped his head around the current corporal punishment controversy.
The real contradiction is that the supporters of banning corporal punishment (CP) are beneficiaries of the same system when they were schooled in the last couple of generations when the cane was a favourite (for teachers) though hated (by students) instrument in the classroom.
Were it not for the cane back then, many of them would have fallen off the education platform and into the pool of indiscipline. With all the arguments for and against corporal punishment, the bigger picture is totally missed.
The bigger picture is this. We’re copying wholesale from the U.S. Yes the U.S. is a so-called developed country. But there are some things in the so-called Third World that we do better. Disciplining our children used to be one of them. But we’ve chosen to embrace whatever the U.S. is doing.
We’ve seen the multiplying of disciplinary problems in U.S. schools with the banning of corporal punishment.
Talk to any teacher out here in the U.S. (and yes, I’m one) and they can tell you horror stories that will make your ears twirl. And what, you may ask, did the U.S. have to gain from banning corporal punishment? Money.
Every program that’s implemented here is motivated by making more money. How? Simple. You stop corporal punishment and children start acting up. When they act up you diagnose each behavior and label it.
Then comes the medication. That’s the money-maker. Last year, doctors at one hospital here were complaining about students being dumped in their laps for medication to modify behavior and that it was costing taxpayers millions.
The main argument sold to the public to vilify corporal punishment was that it damaged students psychologically – this from the very people who were kept on the straight and narrow by this method when they were growing up.
If this argument held water then the entire, now middle-aged generation, as well as those that came before during the reign of corporal punishment should be psychologically damaged.
For me, personally, although I did not like it when I was in school, I know for a fact corporal punishment kept me on the straight and narrow. I didn’t get much of it in school because I knew what boundaries not to cross or I’d get it. It taught me there are consequences to crossing that line. CP even motivated me in the learning department.
I remember one incident when my class returned from lunch and the teacher, a Mr. Williams, began doing math where we had to multiply by 16. Some brave soul meekly pointed out to him that he never gave us 16 times tables to learn. He wrote it out on the board and told us to copy it, then sent us under the school to learn it in 15 minutes. Mr. Williams was an expert on using the cane. I used to think he was an ‘A’ student when he did the caning course in teacher’s college. From that time to this day I still know the 16 times tables. Had there been no caning during my school days I probably would not have even attended High School much less college.
When I learned that corporal punishment was being taken out of schools at home, I predicted discipline in schools and teacher respect would plummet. I had no idea it would fall this steeply and this far so fast. What in the world made us think in banning caning in our schools students would get better? And when do we start medicating our students? Do we have the finance for that? I might be wrong, but the cane was much cheaper and more effective.
Nathaniel Hinckson
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Apr 19, 2024
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