School parents beware 3830

You are confusing two things - or perhaps I did not make myself clear enough as only one of them was the subject of this discussion. I do rule the cane out completely as an option available to teachers, because I regard it as barbaric. I am not opposed entirely to the sort of minor corporal punishment - a light smack on the bum - a parent may administer to a toddler when they are doing the tanty thing. Beyond that temporary stage of infant irrationality, I never had to strike my children. I said I personally prefered a short sharp burst of physical pain to mental torture. I did not say there was no alternative other than mental torture and I would not want you to think I was being inconsistent on this point.

When you have THRASHED kids???? This is the other reason why the cane was outlawed - because it turned the teacher into a violent inflictor of pain - and some of them enjoyed it. There are so many verifiable Christian Brothers stories to this effect that I am in no doubt of that.

You worry me when you talk of thrashing a kid. You are an adult clinically adminstering serious pain and they have no power to control your violence towards them. For all your noble intentions, this is as dangerous for you as it is for them. You won't agree.... but I never found it necessary to hit a child when I was teaching, and apart from the toddler tantrums (and partly, too, being an inexperienced parent) I repeat that to thrash a child is physical buttault and an admission of failure on your part to be able to control that child with anything but calculated violence.

I worry about the pleasure and sense of power it gives to the thrasher, my friend. You may be of noble disposition and rise above it; my belief is that it can corrupt the user and even pervert the child under some circumstances. The mental pain resulting from the physical pain may leave permanent emotional scars - it's too fine a line.

I agree and that is why I said that children will accept even the cruellest punishment if they think they deserve it. But maybe they don't deserve that sort of treatment in the first place.

They are not my chief concern, because I agree with you that the documented instances are comparatively rare. I am more concerned that it legitimises a dangerous form of violence towards children. Again, you will not agree because your intentions are honourable, but to my mind it creates the sort of mentality that reaches its most vicious conclusion in the moralising and rationalising of torture in prisons like Abu Ghraib. (And I don't raise that to start a discussion about that mentality or to politicise or emotionalise the discussion - I am simply saying that this is the logical, clinical conclusion to the legitimisation of 'thrashing' children. There is always some 'higher purpose'. I don't buy it.)

Rifty

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