Corporal punishment seen rife in U.S. schools
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20080820/NEWS-USA-SCHOOLS-PUNISHMENT-DC/
So...wow. I had no idea that corporal punishment was so prevalent in schools. I'm sitting here hoping that Utah is not one of the 21 states that allow it.
I was spanked when I was a kid. It did not work for me. It didn't teach me not to do something. It just taught me to flinch when my mom got mad at me. Nearly twenty years down the road, I can laugh when I think about my mom chasing me around the house with a wooden spoon, intent on whacking me for whatever transgression I had committed.
But also now, with the benefit of time and distance I can look back on how being spanked made me feel and develop my own opinion on the practice. And without hesitation I can say that I'm against it. 100% against it. I'm not a parent myself, so I don't have a right to tell anyone how to parent their children, but whenever I see someone spanking their children, I cringe. Because I remember how it made me feel when I was a kid. Rather than teaching me correct behavior, it made me feel like a bad person, and I don't think that's a good thing to teach a child. It made me feel embarrassed and worthless.
I was never spanked in school, and I can't imagine how humiliating it would have been. To have dozens of peers witness something like that? No thank you. I can't think of a circumstance where I feel like spanking a child is okay, and most certainly not in a school.
No comments:
Post a Comment