My father, 84 years old, remembers his elementary school teacher kicking him full-force on his flank (for fooling around with his buddies). Probably not the best approach, but he remembers it to this day.
He also remembers students being forced to kneel on hardened kernels of corn as punishment.
And I was repeatedly told when I was in elementary school, "If you were stupid enough to go home and complain to your parents that your teacher beat you, you just got beaten twice as hard."
kids these days...
How were we to know they'd go home to their fat psychopathic wives to be beaten within and inch of their lives?
Imagine you are the kid which will end in prison. Wouldn't you feel betrayed from society if society can already see that you will end in prison and is doing nothing against it?
You can we haven't accepted the right answer though: more money for education.
Smaller classes, more support, proper trained psychologist
There is some evidence that large class sizes produce better results, and it would seem that whatever the US spends its education money on isn't working, because our students test much lower than our investment would predict.
This isn’t nature versus nurture per se (although I believe the data does show some ability and intelligence is genetic/inherent), but that it takes a lot for a human child to succeed unless they’re at the higher end of the bell curve (and even then it’s no guarantee).
Mostly outside of education. The US spends a lot on education and gets poor results for the investment because it also spends on lot on institutionalizing racism and reinforcing socioeconomic insecurity in the working class, which creates a lot for the education system to work against.
The evidence that physical violence as punishment against children is counterproductive and harmful to their development is pretty overwhelming (and the evidence that it is harmful for those who merely witness and are under pervasive threat of it rather than actually punished with it is also strong.)
Promoting abuse of children just because you were raised in an environment where abuse was normalized (and one where that might have been excusable as nonculpable ignorance because the evidence of harm was not as compelling as it has since become) does little but demonstrate what the phrase “cycle of abuse” means.
Studies that separated measured corporal punishment from outright abuse found drastically different results.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992110/
I had this debate with a friend a year ago, and when we dug into the literature, it was certainly rather mixed.
We were well down this path when I graduated in '99, and went full steam ahead during my kid's primary school career. You either escaped to a (private or suburban) school not full of juvenile delinquents who had parents that still cared, or you simply gave up on having your child have an actual education.
The inner city school I had to attend in 1998 was more or less a daycare even back then, and the anecdotes I hear today have only gone further in that direction.
Young people now literally behave better wherever you look. The generation that grew in 90ties just was not better behaved.
I'm not talking about better behaved. I'm talking about better behaved in school, or you got expelled very quickly. That left others who were there to learn (or at least not to be disruptive) move forward in peace. I have no opinion on if kids were better behaved outside the classroom - likely not, having grown up during that time.
A single kid can ruin an entire semester for 40 kids in the classroom. I've personally watched it happen, and there was nothing the teacher could do. Averages don't matter in this situation - only outliers do.
I'd go back to a "rougher" generation that learns to behave when appropriate (and those that don't learn, get removed) any day of the week over what we currently have in the average urban public school system.
Edit: Heck, I got suspended from a couple classes in high school due to attendance issues. Rightfully so since I was holding back other students on group projects and the like. Today that would be utterly unheard of in that same school system.
You just idealize own generation, that is all. Which is odd, because at the time superpredators panic was going on and people fretted.
I still believe we're talking about entirely different things. One of my schools was incredibly rough. If you talked back to a teacher you'd get instantly suspended, and on the third one bounced to alternative schooling. I was one of those kids.
That no longer happens, and was starting to slip when I was due to graduate. These days I've witnessed students literally hurling desks at teachers and smashing windows only to be back in the classroom on Monday.
Yes, I totally agree violence was more in your face in the 90s. The utter disrespect towards teachers and those trying to learn with zero consequences for your actions was simply not there yet, at least in my small section of the world. Perhaps on the coasts and other major cities this was already the norm.
There simply is no mechanism to separate the small percentage of troublemakers from the general student population any longer, much less providing challenges for the high achievers. This drags down standards and morale on a massive fashion, and the results simply speak for themselves.
The "best" school I went to during my illustrious schooling career was an inner city private school where almost all the kids were on 90%+ needs-based scholarships. Selection bias where only the parents who cared enough to jump through the loopholes made that place bearable - so teachers that actually taught stuck around. The difference in attitudes and hope was utterly night and day. Almost entirely because the bottom 10% or so wasn't dragging everyone else down to their behavioural level.
This does make things harder and disrupts learning for others.
>According to transcripts, France's son passed only three classes in his four years of high school, earning a 0.13 grade point average. What's worse is that her son's GPA puts him near the top half of this class. He was also late or absent to school 359 days.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
And kids at the very bottom have better and more support available now. It is not perfect, it often sux and is not available to everybody. I definitely don't mean to say it is somehow super great. But the kids at the bottom with cognitively issues or impulsive control issues have better chance to learn more then used to be normal.
But that also was seen as discriminatory I think because it wasn't that easy to move out of basic etc once you were there so I think they stopped this as well - I think system was called tracking.
If the kids failed either way, it's cheaper to make them fail in 12 years than 13 or 14.
The only difference is rituál around it.
It was literally never true that the word would refer to beating a kid by open hand only. The books that teach parents to spank also give advice to use instruments and call it spanking.
Old books that contain spanking use the word beating as synonyms. It started to be used as different word when people started to take issue with it more often.
I agree that it is not the right way to discipline a child, but I can recognize this distinction in meaning.
I find this interesting, actually, as a form of argument. The annihilation of semantic categories. It's like argument via Sapir-Whorf.
I assume people are so appalled by the concept of physical punishment (which, let's be clear, I don't do and barely experienced either), that they don't want to acknowledge... how English works.
"Spanking" implies an open palm or maybe a belt or thin switch, on the rump. It hurts; it may leave a bruise; it may be barbaric -- but it doesn't involve serious injury (say, to internal organs). The point is to inflict pain without serious injury.
"Beating" carries no such connotations of limited harm. It can be done with fists or blunt objects; it can target the face or internal organs like the kidneys; it can be severe enough to lead to death.
This difference in meaning is as much about connotation as denotation, but the connotational differences are very large. You might say that, logically, a spanking is a kind of limited beating, but not all beatings are spankings.
So, as a matter of language, you're right.
This is in bad faith, a drug lord won't give you a spanking unless it's sexual in nature. I assume you know the difference between a sexual spanking and a beating in the street. Perhaps not. A parent can give a beating, but that is different from a spanking.
I think trying to equivocate a spanking with a beating is intellectually dishonest. If you can't tell the difference in both intent and intensity, I have no idea where you are coming from. You might be against spankings but to argue the words spanking and beating are synonyms is simply wrong, and quite honestly, juvenile in the level of reasoning. As the OP said, words matter.
It sounds like you leaving the profession was best for everyone involved.
Rather, it said things like this:
> One of the things that students benefit from (diverse educators) is this idea of seeing themselves not only leading classrooms, but also in the curriculum
Do you see the difference? They want to engage students by empowering them. In contrast, you wanted to demand respect through fear of punishment. It’s not hard to imagine why your days were plagued with interpersonal conflict.
They lack any ability or willpower to meaningfully hold students accountable. My wife felt physically unsafe with this student in her room, yet apparently nothing could be done.
"Inability to punish students, lack of respect"
To people today this all sounds barbaric. However, there were far fewer "broken people" coming out of that system than is produced today. That generation was not filled with sociopaths and 'challenged" people -- quite the opposite. It's the system today that produces those. Lack of ability to administer punishment is part of why teachers get so little respect.
The past 2 years was very revealing as to how our modern public schools are failing today. It's embarrassing, and I understand and support the moves many parents are making to private or home schooling.
People will argue this until they’re blue in the face, but pulling a deadly weapon out escalates the situation, when de-escalation would likely lead to a less physically harmful outcome.
Is this some kind of joke? If you want to lead with _that_, I hope you never are put in a position of power over any kid ever again.
I was generally a good and respectful student, and I was punished on the occasions I misbehaved or was disruptive. I think that punishment was necessary and helpful.
As a father, I remember the only time my kid got in trouble at school. I received a strongly worded letter from my child's school that my child had been disrespectful to a teacher and that he was going to receive detention. It was like pulling teeth to get them to tell me what my child had actually done that was disrespectful. When asked (in email) they just kept repeating that he was disrespectful and they talked a lot about the teacher's feelings but never told me what my specifically kid had done or said. I wrote them back a last time suggesting I meet with the principal and the teacher in person to discuss the issue. They never replied to me, but I found out through my kid that they dropped the detention. I'd have pressed further, but we were already moving our kid to another school because of other shenanigans and overall low education quality.
I asked my kid for his version of events. He said that he took a test about the field trip they had been on, and he had left the last question "What did you learn?" blank. The teacher suggested he answer the question. My kid said leaving it blank was his answer and the teacher left to check on the other kids. If this bothered the teacher, it wasn't even addressed at the time.
Now, I had a good talk with my kid about the situation and I agree that he shouldn't have left that question blank. (I also sympathized with him because the field trip was the same each year and not exactly information rich. It was overall I think a good learning moment for him.) But this was what hurt the teacher's feelings and she found disrespectful? If the kid refuses to answer the question let his score reflect it. If you're not okay with blank questions, make that a detention-worthy offense. But to bring me your hurt feelings and how my kid was disrespectful... and then to not even be willing to tell me about it? I thought maybe my kid had a tone or was otherwise rude in his delivery of his decision; but if so, they wouldn't tell me about it. And I've talked to my kid about this incident since, and even as an adult he has no idea why the teacher had the reaction she seemed to have had.
Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse.
I don't know what the solution is; parents suck and let their kids get away with murder. But many current parents also experienced such 'guidance' and have no desire to see their kids experience it as well.
"Anyway, the point of this is that discipline in schools is mostly unfair, arbitrary, and not clearly effective. In the general case there are no trials, no weighing of the evidence, or anything to protect the student from unfair treatment or abuse."
To be fair, the criminal "justice" system works the same way - abuses of power, arbitrary punishments, recidivism, etc. And, you can have a trial if you feel like starting a law suit, but I don't know how much justice one finds there either. Up to 10% of the incarcerated are wrongfully convicted. I think we should be working to fix both systems, but given this it's perhaps better to learn that this is how the system works when the stakes are detention vs prison.