Back to the Future? On Corporal Punishment, Count This Columnist Out

Is that Doc Brown and the DeLorean I see or did a Missouri Cassville School District just reinstate corporal punishment for schoolchildren whose parents “opt-in” to this allegedly in-demand disciplinary program?If you’re not yet feeling physically ill, let me remind you that corporal punishment is still legal in 19 states, the education codes of which offer some variation of the following definition: “… the deliberate infliction of physical pain by hitting, paddling, spanking, slapping, or any other physical force used as a means of discipline.” In other words, when it comes to what merits punishment, teacher discretion reigns supreme, and it’s the overworked, underpaid, and routinely unvetted dealer’s choice. Disclaimer: I’ve worked in education for most of my career, and I think, generally speaking, educators are gods among men. Nonetheless, decisions regarding violence are hardly ever sound.Taking a purely legal approach, the entire plan seems bankrupt. Even when parents withhold consent, should their children be hit, they tend to not have much recourse since the practice is still legal at the state level. As Vice News reported, “Even with an opt-out form in place, Texas educators have fairly strong immunity in corporal punishment cases as long as there’s no evidence of excessive force or negligence.”What’s more, from a demographic standpoint, it’s horrifying; black students are twice as likely as white students to experience corporal punishment, and kids from low-income backgrounds in participating states are more likely to be placed in schools that administer it.Technical points aside, the implications of Missouri’s reinstatement are profoundly distressing, raising important questions about children’s rights, bodily autonomy, parenting, effective pedagogy, violence, mental and physical health, and the relationship between a culture, country, state, school, and home.In defense of corporal punishment, educators and parents from participating states continue to vouch for the effectiveness of the practice. Putting aside the fact that there is something inherently subjective and elusive about defining “effectiveness” in the context of student behavior (for instance, is it effective in mitigating “bad” behavior; is it effective in the short or long term; is it effective in educating the child about his misdeeds, communal norms, school conduct, respect, etc.), there are mountains of evidence that suggest that such disciplinary measures are ineffective, counterproductive, and, in fact, harmful. Combating misguided views in support of corporal punishment, in a 2016 interview with PBS, Education Week’s Sarah Sparks said, “We have studies that find higher aggression rates; higher defiance of adults. There’s even a recent neurological study that found students who had experienced corporal punishment several times, over time, had lower brain matter in the part of the brain associated with self control.”Similarly, a psychotherapist, educator, and the founder of StopSpanking.org, Robbyn Peters Bennett, regularly lectures about the long-term medical and emotional detriment caused by early childhood stresses, chief among them physical abuse.Referring to one of the most trusted and largest analyses of childhood trauma, the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, Ms. Bennett explains that people who score four or higher (representative of increased trauma) are two and a half times more likely to have cardiac disease, four and a half times more likely to be chronically depressed, five times more likely to struggle with alcoholism, 12 times more likely to attempt suicide in teenage years, and 13 times more likely to be IV drug users.Ms. Bennett further explains that childhood stressors, such as physical abuse, neglect, and emotional abuse, often make it hard for victims to self-regulate. Without calm adults to help them co-regulate in early years, children’s “regulatory equipment,” as she calls it, is damaged.While the Adverse Childhood Experiences study typically refers to abuse, neglect, and dysfunction in the home, in recognition of the fact that schools are extensions of home from a time-spent standpoint and/or havens from abusive homes, it seems all the more important that we ban corporal punishment in whichever institutions allow for such oversight.In other words, if we can’t stop parents from abusing their children, thereby saddling them and American society with a whole host of long-term health and emotional struggles, the least we can do is combat those abuses with an abundance of love and patient understanding at school.Now, though the legal and medical arguments are entirely sufficient for the eradication of corporal punishment in our schools, what call to me most resoundingly are the obviously fruitless and actually damaging pedagogical effects of these practices. To start, in paddling children, we’re quite literally teaching violence. To elaborate: We’re teaching children that violence is an acceptable way of managing conflict. We’re teaching them that people who are meant to care for and love them are justified in physically abusing them. We’re teaching them that, when we feel overwhelmed or out of control, we can lean into base instincts rather than doing the hard work of articulating feelings and more healthily finding equanimity.We’re teaching them that consent is a flimsy notion and that their bodily autonomy is precarious. And, of course, we’re teaching them to submit. So, sure; corporal punishment is wildly effective if our goal is to induce fear, force children to fall silent, and teach them the lesson that, in this world, small voices are no match for brute force. But don’t we have enough horrible historical examples of that injustice such that we don’t have to be the cause of its internalization in the lives of our nation’s youngest and most precious people?In defense of Cassville’s reinstatement of corporal punishment, superintendent Merlyn Johnson said, “No one is jumping up and down saying we want to do this because we like to paddle kids. That is not the reason that we would want to do this…. The positive reinforcement, we love it. That works with a lot of kids,” he said. “However, some kids play the game and their behaviors aren’t changing.”So, essentially, because these educators don’t have the imagination, creativity, and energy to muster something more effective and less traumatic than physical abuse, they’ll time-travel back to one of humanity’s worst missteps and pat themselves on the backs for a surface-level demonstration of restored order.I’ve been wondering — why the regression, and why now? Is it a symptom of President Trump’s retrogrogressive call to “Make America Great Again”? Is it a symptom of pandemic-era existential crisis? In other words, do we feel so powerless that we’re unconsciously inclining toward the most tangible and conspicuous ways of regaining bodily control?Are parents so afraid that they or their children may die that, as one of my high school history teachers argued about life prior to the invention of antibiotics, they use physical abuse as a distancing mechanism to curb their love and keep them from attaching too deeply to people they may lose?In her 2013 TED Talk, Ms. Bennett reported that 50 percent of toddlers are hit more than three times a week (predominantly in a domestic context). Turning to her audience, she asked, “Can you just imagine how you’d feel if your spouse was smacking you a couple times a week?”Referring to spanking as “sanctioned violence against children” and invoking all of the relevant medical and psychological research that points to its detriment, Ms. Bennett offers her vision for the future. “If we were to end spanking,” she says, “we would change the brains of an entire generation.”I’d like to see this country undertake that experiment and produce the associated 50-year study. What would happen in America’s next chapter if its incumbent leaders were untouched by corporal punishment and had every opportunity to grow, in safety, toward complete self-worth and healthy regulation? No, we can’t ensure functional and healthy homes, but we can start with our schools. As they should be, our schools can be leaders in education not just for children but for parents and society at large. They can be cultural leaders and changemakers. And it’s high time America’s schools took up that grave and hallowed mantle.

Back to the Future? On Corporal Punishment, Count This Columnist Out

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