Punishment in schools

Did you ever have the pleasure of experiencing this and in what forms?
My very first physical punishment(I had been screamed at many times before this) was in the 2nd grade, our teacher went out of our class briefly and I ran out the classroom to play in the rain outside. When the teacher got back, seeing my wet uniform, summoned me to her desk where she took out her pen and struck me on my knuckles and she kept striking over and over again until I yelled out in pain.

your first?

Corporal punishment isn't allowed in public schools in the US. I got a detention once (basically you have to stay in school longer for a day, ususally doing nothing or writing up why what you did was wrong, hwo you can change, etc.). Other than that, I didn't really get punished in school, really. I was just too good to get caught .

W. Joe Smith wrote:Corporal punishment isn't allowed in public schools in the US...

21 states still allow it. (Ref: FamilyEducation.com.)

I was forced to study.

Long ago, I went to parochial schools (Catholic). The nuns would regularly whack bad students with a ruler across the knuckles, which hurt a lot.

In high school, there was only one person allowed to physically touch students. But while I never triggered his wrath, he was known to punch and occasionally throw students up against the wall. This was not a particularly rough school, but a lot of the teachers learned in ghetto schools that were very tough. I think the teachers didn't immediately back down to meet the culture.

There were not a lot of discipline problems there, unlike what I hear of current public schools. Private and parochial schools have one huge advantage: they can expel students.

I think it was in fourth standard.

I did not enjoy writing much; we were supposed to answer all exercise questions(those given at the end of a chapter) in our notebooks. I never did those exercises and got punished every time. But the punishment was to either go out of the class or kneel down in front of the class. I chose punishment over writing. This became a routine until the teacher realized how stubborn and shameless I was!

One day she called me to her desk, placed a pencil between my fingers and pressed them against it. It was very painful; I cried. She then called my parents and told them all this and so my punishment did not end there. I got a beating from my parents too.

Pat Farrell wrote:Long ago, I went to parochial schools (Catholic). The nuns would regularly whack bad students with a ruler across the knuckles, which hurt a lot.

When I attended St. Louis de France (back in Eocene epoch) the nuns had these 3 1/2 ft pointers consisting of polished dowels with a bullet-shaped ribber tip. That gave them a much longer reach than a ruler, and they were crack shots. I don't know what kind of wood they were made of, but they were hard.

I think I only got whacked once -- I was pretty much a goody-two-shoes.

I googled for "St. Louis de France" and came up with a bunch of places in Quebec. I clicked on a Yellow Pages entry and it came up with a Javascript alert box saying "$ajaxResult not defined". Thought you might find that amusing.

Paul Clapham wrote:I googled for "St. Louis de France" and came up with a bunch of places in Quebec.

Close, sort of. The school I attended is in a section of Lowell, Massachusetts called Little Quebec. It's where my grandparents immigrated to and where my parents were born. There's still a strong French Canadian presence in the area.

That explains my last name, and why I sometimes still use phrases like "I go do my store me".

When I was in my 9th grade there was a sadist maths teacher who used to slap and hit me for trivial reason.He used to catch my hair and bang my head on the bench...Ironically I was good in Maths,but he used to find some fault or the other and hit me..
Unfortunately he continued as a maths teacher even in 10th grade.

After 10th grade,I changed my school and I teamed up with one other victim to take revenge on this teacher.He used to take private tutions in some place and would walk home late at night.We found the place he is taking tution and followed him to know the route he is taking.Next day my friend drove the bike and I was seated in the pillion.I gave him two good punches and smeared cow dung on his face and we sped away.

Teachers should be respected and are to be treated as god.. but not all teachers deserve this respect these days ..Till this day I believe what I did was correct..

Never had this in school, and it is not allowed in the Netherlands.

I do remember one story: In high school, a guy in the back of the class was sleeping while the teacher was explaining something. When the teacher saw this, he suddenly stopped, sneaked up to the desk of the sleeping guy and banged on the desk with a brick very hard. The whole class was ofcourse shaken by this, and the sleeping guy had a rude wakeup.

marc weber wrote:

W. Joe Smith wrote:Corporal punishment isn't allowed in public schools in the US...

21 states still allow it. (Ref: FamilyEducation.com.)

Really? Wow, I didn't think it was allowed anymore....I'd be interested to see how many schools in those states actually practice corporal punishment. Personally, I am against it as a school practice. I know if anyone tried to punish me like that my parents would have been, to put it lightly, very angry.

It isn't allowed in Iowa, where I went to school, though, so there was no problem here.

W. Joe Smith wrote:...I'd be interested to see how many schools in those states actually practice corporal punishment...

According to a 2008 CNN article...

Corporal punishment in schools remains legal in 21 U.S. states and is used frequently in 13 [concentrated in the South]... The highest percentage of students receiving corporal punishment was in Mississippi, with 7.5 percent of students. The highest number was in Texas, with 48,197 students...

Overall, 223,190 students received corporal punishment in 2006-07, according to the Department of Education statistics.

In my elementary school (in rural northeast Florida in the 1960s) the teachers and the principal kept fly-back paddles (after removing the rubber band and rubber ball) to use for spanking the children. The principal was a man, so he hit harder -- that was next higher threat level after the teacher.

In junior high school paddling was handled by the assistant principals and the physical education teachers. Their paddles were much longer, thinker and heavier than in elementary school -- sort of like what college fraternities use for beating the pledges. In the shower room, any student who had recently been paddled had a sharply defined red rectangle across his butt. (Beginning in Jr. High, misbehaving girls were usually suspended rather than paddled.)

The children referred to it as "gettin' a whippin'" -- which didn't make sense to me because I thought that term implied that a whip was used, which was never the case.

In those days, my mother was a teachers' aid in a black elementary school. The principal (a black woman) was very physical with the kids, saying that children from these homes didn't understand anything else. If you just talked to them they'd laugh in your face. After a couple of years the school became racially integrated; the principal didn't dare beat the white children -- she felt that it would have been too provocative. So she would only beat the black children who misbehaved -- if a white child was sent to her office for punishment, she turned him over to the assistant principal (who was white) to do the paddling.

well i'm shocked to see corporal punishment is also allowed in the U.S. With the amount of frivolous lawsuits that are piled up in the judiciary over there I would've thought such a thing would've been a major invitation to a lawsuit. an therefore banned. I'm guessing teachers must have alot of insurance just like doctors have to have in case of a malpractice suit.

On a related note, what do you guys think about corporal punishment? Do you think it is a necessity and kids would turn out more disciplined or do you believe in yelling/cursing/scaring/bribing/guilting etc?


Reading some of the examples of punishments, I am forced to ask, where do you draw the line between corporal punishment and torture?
In my country, India, corporal punishment takes on a whole other meaning when sometimes the child can literally have the life beaten out of him.

Even if the STATE considers it legal, many, many districts have policies banning it. And even if they don't, I doubt many places actually USE it.

School employees have broad federal liability protection under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (see p. 243). This subsection is also at US Department of Education - Paul D. Coverdell Teacher Protection Act of 2001.

Even prior to that, lawsuits at the state level were rarely successful. According to a 2001 New York Times article...

''The vast preponderance of the lawsuits challenging the use of corporal punishment in individual instances are unsuccessful,'' said Charles Vergon, a professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio who has studied the issue for 15 years.

Families tend to win such cases, Professor Vergon said, only when educators have ''abused in a fairly significant way the public's trust.''

I shan't discuss my first punishment at school. (That was too long ago to remember)

However, I can say that my Tech Drawing teacher in high school used to whack us with a plank (He was the only one who did that). In my opinion, that is way more effective than detention or any other 'wussy' form of punishment. I believe that it teaches kids respect. I was rather lazy when it came to homework, but I usually did my homework for his class first, just to save my ass (literally). Seriously, who's afraid of detention? For the record, I'm not advocating beating kids senseless.

Arvind Mahendra wrote:
Reading some of the examples of punishments, I am forced to ask, where do you draw the line between corporal punishment and torture?

Torture is where you inflict pain that is overwhelming and extended, to break a person's will.
Corporal punishment still leaves the person with freedom of choice; you've merely given them a negative incentive.

On a related note, what do you guys think about corporal punishment? Do you think it is a necessity and kids would turn out more disciplined or do you believe in yelling/cursing/scaring/bribing/guilting etc?

People used corporal punishment for as long as there was humanity. In the 20th century some people speculated that it was bad and harmful, but I don't think any well-controlled prospective studies were done to compare different forms of discipline among carefully selected similar subject. There have been retrospective studies which cherry-picked the data points to be included so as to yield a result that corporal punishment is bad.

My suspicion is that in a few circumstances the right level of corporal punishment it will yield the best result, and in a great many circumstances other approaches will produce better results. And corporal punishment can be administered in a way that will produce quite harmful results.

I know people who've worked in the top 5 largest school systems in US, and while corporal punishment isnt used, the other larger issue is school violence by children who cannot be controlled by any means now available. Its only after a crime has been committed and the police are called that real action is taken. Sometimes thats too late for the victims...

The last war story I heard a month ago was from a teacher who worked in a large overcrowded/understaffed middle school. A child confided to her that he would not drink any liquids during the day because he didn't want to use the restroom in school since that is where beatings and fights occur on a regular basis. A few months earlier to that a child was beaten unconscious in the restroom. She's afraid to work there, there are weekly fights of a serious nature, but she has few options.

Unfortunately I could not get the punishment. But I remember an incidence, I went to meet my Maths teacher. He was very rude and strict in nature. All the guys used to say him 'Missile' . I saw a guy (my classmate, who was one day old in this coaching class)
in his house being smacked badly. I asked to other guys why is it happening?

They told me the guy was involve in the molestation of teacher's girl unintentionally.

herb slocomb wrote:I know people who've worked in the top 5 largest school systems in US, and while corporal punishment isnt used, the other larger issue is school violence by children who cannot be controlled by any means now available. Its only after a crime has been committed and the police are called that real action is taken. Sometimes thats too late for the victims...

The last war story I heard a month ago was from a teacher who worked in a large overcrowded/understaffed middle school. A child confided to her that he would not drink any liquids during the day because he didn't want to use the restroom in school since that is where beatings and fights occur on a regular basis. A few months earlier to that a child was beaten unconscious in the restroom. She's afraid to work there, there are weekly fights of a serious nature, but she has few options.

That's what I mean. It's easy to say that other methods of discipline are better than corporal punishment, and that is quite likely true in cases where those other means _work_. But what about when other methods don't work? Is it better to leave his behavior unchanged until his behavior escalates to the degree that you can justify juvenile prison?

Sometimes a child just doesn't care what the school personnel think of him or what they say to him, and just doesn't care whether he gets an education, and is quite happy to deny other children's opportunity to get an education, and such children may well call the teachers' bluff. Then what?

You can expel the child -- but the law _requires_ all children be offered _some_ public school option.
You can transfer him to a school for children with behavior problems, but that just pushes the problem onto them.
Also, in some communities where many children are neglected by their parents, it may be politically impossible to transfer all the children who are like that.

Or, you can leave them in place and _not_ force them to change their behavior, whereupon they destroy the educational opportunity for all the other children in the school (in which case you can whine about how certain failing schools need better funding).

Or, you can say that such children simply need a teacher who in more inspirational than regular teachers -- which leaves open questions about what to do with the extra children when there aren't enough inspirational teachers to go around, or how to convince inspirational people to become teachers, and if you did get enough such people then how to fire all the teachers who are not sufficiently inspirational.

We have a great discussion here in Germany, where at private elite schools run by different clergy systems not only physical punishment is used but also sexual abuse of the pupils. I wonder how stupid parents are who give their children away to such schools thinking that their children get the best education on earth, while these poor souls just get abused sexually and physically.

Darya Akbari wrote:We have a great discussion here in Germany, where at private elite schools run by different clergy systems not only physical punishment is used but also sexual abuse of the pupils. I wonder how stupid parents are who give their children away to such schools thinking that their children get the best education on earth, while these poor souls just get abused sexually and physically.

Some schools are required to get parent's permission to spank. (Otherwise, I guess other punishments such as suspensions and detention are used, I guess.) Are the schools in Germany required to get parents' permission to sexually abuse the pupils?

Darya Akbari wrote:... not only physical punishment is used but also sexual abuse of the pupils.

I am hoping
1) You are kidding (This is Meaningless Drivel after all)
2) This is a rumor
3) This is an one off incident

I wish it was only a joke. Follow the discussion in Germany here

Darya Akbari wrote:I wish it was only a joke. Follow the discussion in Germany here

We hear of many such scandals in the U.S. I wonder whether this sort of thing went on fifty, a hundred years ago, or whether the clergy itself has been corrupted by the permissive spirit in society. (In the Schulmaedchen Report movies back in the 1970s, it was usually the pupils who were trying to tempt the priests.)

Looks like such stupid punishments are in the increase, at least in India..

Check out these articles

http://despardes.com/wp/2009/05/15/girl-dies-after-being-hit-by-teacher/

http://www.in.com/news/current-affairs/fullstory-orissa-teacher-beats-student-to-death-flees-12856817-edbff4f85cfeeb0efd4ea96dcc4367868654838d-1.html

http://www.hindustantimes.com/audio-news-video/chhattisgarh/Chhattisgarh-teacher-arrested-for-blinding-student/Article1-365151.aspx

http://www.aussieindolanka.com/news/india/education/?newsid=77326&NewsDate=




I think such teachers deserve to be lynched in coderanch..

Rambo Prasad wrote:I think such teachers deserve to be lynched in coderanch..

Better put them into a cage with a group of Bonobo apes

When teachers have no ability to discipline students effectively in the US, the result is tragic violence.
From today's news headlines:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/deerfield/fl-deerfield-middle-fight-20100318,0,1999406.story

Was in my 9th standard and recently joined in that school. I didn't mostly wear underwear to school. My parents knew it. On that day there was a drill conducted by fire department in our school. During the drill boys were asked to strip to underwear. Baniyan n jatti were only allowed. As the session was separately for boys and girls, I had no concerns to strip. I was nude and few other elder and younger boys too. We were watching the drill. Physical master wanted me to get his file from the office.  As the school was calm and went to the office room. It's a common office room. There were few teachers sitting. I forgot I was nude and asked for permission to get into.. They laughed at me very badly.

Welcome to the Ranch Since most posts on this forum don't have photos on, you are quite safe here.