If you consider paddling to be an advantage in education, then you must see the disturbing implications of relatively middle class suburban kids from Mississippi being outperformed by inner city students from New York when youngsters in Mississippi get the ‘advantage’ of being paddled more than anyone in the country, while no child has been paddled in a New York City School for 100 years. To broaden the perspective perhaps you think America should be grateful that China, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland banned corporal punishment of students years ago, since they otherwise would have taken over our manufacturing, engineering, and pharmaceuticals industries much sooner.

I think we should be modeling our schools on schools systems that work. Your point seems to be that schools worked fifty years ago, and that the only significant thing that has changed since then is the removal of paddling. I think this is a foolish thing to say, and I’ll use my own family as an illustration of why.

My mother was one of nine kids raised on a farm in rural Ohio. Mom studied hard because she didn’t want to spend her life shoveling pig manure and taking a crap in a little wooden hut while squatting over a reeking hole in the ground. Sure, they had paddling at school, but the major motivator was neither fear of punishment nor lofty ideals but rather a very sensible desire for comfort, ease, a pleasant environment, good food, nice things, and engaging entertainment.

It is hard to imagine kids today wanting a better life than the one they already have. To suggest that the biggest difference is a lack of paddling or that the discomfort of being spanked could ever motivate as effectively as the discomfort of sharing a bed with two siblings is intellectually bankrupt.

Even if fear of a spanking had been a main motivation for studying, you must admit that disengaging from the non-stop entertainment smorgasbord of modern childhood long enough to do home work is probably far more unpleasant to most kids than enduring the very brief discomfort of a school paddling.

In fact, if you gave my mom, at age twelve, a choice between staying on the farm and never being paddled at school, or living the life of a modern teen and being paddled every single day, she would have chosen the paddle. When I was nine I would have let you whip me for a half and hour to get my hands on a Nintendo Wii for an entire afternoon — are you kidding me?

My answer to improving schools is to model our systems on what works. Beyond that I can’t explain to exactly how school districts that don’t paddle have been consistently producing the world best educated youngsters for the last three decades, any more than I can explain how doctors perform open heart surgery. But I can tell you that not only are people are doing it, they are doing it better.

Seems to me that we might need a refresher on the difference between correlation and causation, but it’s hard to tell from your tone. Anyway, for the record, seems to me that the states with lowest graduation rates and the highest rates of incarceration might, just *might* have the highest number of students who need paddling. Just saying.

Anyhow, the libtards are intellectually bankrupt on this issue. We shouldn’t discipline, we should expel. Expelled students can’t get jobs, end up criminals. “We shouldn’t incarcerate, we should reform.” So please tell me when the solution is to take action and not make the problem someone else’s problem?

So next time I hear the winging paean of “there has to be a better waaaaaaaaaaaaay!” my response, will as always be…

Tell me YOUR plan.

Until then, I will take responsibility for my actions, and teach my children to take responsibility for their own.

And the rest of you who want to make the entire world innocent of personal responsibiltiy, you can shut the “H”-”E”-double-hockey sticks up.

Great post, coming from a former paddlee.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights Compiled by The Center For Effective Discipline

Consider this my Stop the ACLU Blogburst: (possible objectionable language warning)…