Re: [Phys-L] Does anyone doubt that someone is Politicallybaiting...

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

It has nothing to do with self esteem.  Essentially corporal punishment
prevents morality from being internalized.  People treat it as something
which is external so it is allright as long as you get away with it.  It
also makes people more brutal and more prone to be abusers.  I have a
personal story which illustrates this:

My brother saw some fellow students shop lifting in a store.  He was shocked
by this behavior.  The other students had been subject to "whippings", but
my father used "psychology" and always explained to my brother why something
was wrong.

Piaget noted that morality went through stages.  Essentially corporal
punishment can prevent people from acquiring the later mature stages of
morality.  Of course it doesn't happen for all.  So some children subject to
corporal punishment are OK, while others are not.  It is like the fact that
those who are abused as children tend to become abusers as adults.  But some
escape this "curse".

The other problem with corporal punishment is that it can be very capricious
and can result in injury.

The school I went to only had 1 teacher who resorted to paddling, and she
was the worst teacher in the whole school.  She picked on kids and nearly
destroyed my brother who is ADD and inattentive.  It took a whole year of
the next teacher to fix the problem.  When she got my brother he had
retreated into a dreamworld and paid absolutely no attention.  He did this
as an escape mechanism from the bad teacher.  The second teacher never
paddled a student, and I doubt she paddled her children.

There is no need for corporal punishment in schools.  I think you will find
that the states that allow it tend to be lower in educational
accomplishment.  It sends the wrong message.  Consequences that flow
logically from the student actions are much more effective than things like
paddling.  Then let us not forget that in old London pickpockets supposedly
had good work when other pickpockets were hanged.

I could get on the web and look up studies which show the effects of
corporal punishment, but I will leave that to someone else.  And I do not
adhere to self-esteem pop psychology.  But of course the people who wrote
the endorsement of corporal punishment do not believe in research.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> Are those the same psychologists that pushed 'student 
> self-esteem' as a
> guiding principle?
>
>
> None of us have a corner on "truth".  Incidentally the
> same document defends corporal punishment in schools despite 
> the fact that
> the psychologists have shown that it is not effective and it 
> has some bad
> long term effects.