Friday 16 September 2011

Bring back the Cane?

Was listening to Jeremy Vines show on Radio 2 this lunchtime and caught the piece on bringing back Corporal Punishment in schools. They had someone on arguing with the same phrase everyone uses when they argue for it, "Never Did Me Any Harm". You need to define harm as what it actually seems to have done is that it's made you into someone who can't see anything wrong with hitting a child because you can't make them listen to you.

Basically the argument seems to be, when I was young things were better and kids were better behaved in class, we had the cane in schools when I was young, therefore things were better because we had the cane. A kind of odd circular logic, that takes no account of any changes in society in the last 20 to 30 years, and places all worsening behaviour in the context of teachers not being able to thrash the children, rather than looking at any other reasons for it. Drives you mental.

We never had the cane when I was at school, or the belt or anything like it. Was banned in my primary school before I went, and I went to Secondary school (in Scotland) in 1988. I don't remember anything like the problems people speak about today then, although I do believe they're exaggerated in a lot of cases anyway, but it didn't cause any problems to my teachers not being able to hit us. Or didn't seem to anyway, as I remember. Some of them were better teachers than others, some of them couldn't manage a class too well, but it was never an issue that led to violence in the classroom, or any major problems. So why do you need corporal punishment, how will that help anything do you think? Without looking at whats causing the problems you're telling us about, it's just more unjustified violence in my view.

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