Lawsuits Touch Off Debate Over Paddling in Schools nytimes.com
On to more obscure wrongheaded W initiatives. This is a few days old, and I really ought to post it out among the more overt holy roller crowd on the BR, but I'm trying to stay away from that particular hotbed of "principled, honest discussion".
Megan, a fourth grader whose name appears more often on the honor roll than on a
referral slip to the principal's office, is one of millions of public school students still
subject to corporal punishment, and in March her family joined a small but apparently
growing number who are suing to stop it. Megan's classmate DeWayne Ebarb, a
hyperactive child who has been paddled regularly throughout his time at Zwolle
Elementary — on 17 occasions in 8 weeks last fall alone — filed a second suit in late
April, leaving this close- knit logging town of 2,000 pondering a practice as old as time.
Though it gets little attention, corporal punishment in schools remains legal in 23 states,
and the United States Education Department's most recent data show that 365,000
children were paddled in the 1997-98 school year, most in a swath of Southern states
that could be called the Belt Belt.
Yet recent debate over corporal punishment focuses largely on parents, with even
many pro-spanking psychologists and pediatricians loath to support the principal's
paddle. At the same time, though, some school districts and states say they must
increasingly rely on physical discipline as the public pushes for a crackdown on
student misbehavior.
And legislation pending in Congress as part of President Bush's education package
could expand the practice by giving teachers and principals broad protection from
liability for disciplinary actions.
"Almost every democracy in the world has bans on corporal punishment — we're
going in the opposite direction," said Robert Fathman of Dublin, Ohio, president of the
National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools. "You can't whack a
prisoner, but you can whack a kindergarten child."
It's all part of living in a "Christian Nation", I guess. |
