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.