| A 13-year-old boy beaten with a cricket bat; junior-school children smacked in front of the | ||
| whole school for persistent and deliberate disobedience'; 11 and 12-year-old girls given eight | ||
| strokes of the cane for stealing money. These cases are not from the last century. Nor are they | ||
| from some violent society, run by fanatical mullahs or generals, in Asia or Africa. All these | ||
| 5 | incidents have occurred in British schools in the 1980s. | |
| According to the legal textbooks, these punishments were carried out 'for the purpose of | ||
| correcting what is evil in the child'. The law upholds teachers' rights to beat children because | ||
| they represent the parents and can, therefore, use any punishment that a reasonable parent would | ||
| use. | ||
| 10 | But how many ordinary parents use canes on their own sons or daughters? I have only ever met | |
| two who admitted to it. This seems to me the crux of the argument. There is no comparison | ||
| nowadays between corporal punishment in the average home and beatings at school. Like most | ||
| parents, I want my children to believe that violence is wrong. But it would be absurd to pretend | ||
| that they do not sometimes infuriate me to the extent of slapping or shaking them. Afterward, | ||
| 15 | I feel guilty and, possibly, I apologize and explain that if goaded beyond endurance, parents | |
| sometimes resort to violence. | ||
| Isn't that the lesson they should learn; that, among reasonable adults, violence is an | ||
| aberration; that it happens when people have lost control of their emotions; that, on second | ||
| thoughts, most people regret it? We are never going to live in a non-violent world, but at least | ||
| 20 | we can strive to minimize violence. | |
| By institutionalizing it, by subjecting it to rules and regulations, schools are giving children | ||
| the opposite message. They are suggesting that, if violence is planned and considered, it is more | ||
| defensible. Yet, in most areas of life (including the courts of law ), we attempt to excuse extreme | ||
| behaviour by arguing it was unpremeditated. 'Passion or rage' (created by appropriate provocation) | ||
| 25 | is a defence; cold, calculating violence is considered more reprehensible. | |
| This is what makes non sense of the argument that teachers represent the parents. At home, | ||
| corporal punishment is usually immediate, informal and unceremonious. It is carried out by | ||
| someone who has a close relationship with the child. The traditional school beating, carried out | ||
| by a remote authority figure, normally the head, is usually delayed, considered, formal and | ||
| 30 | ritualistic. The current proposal from Sir Keith Joseph, the education secretary, to change the | |
| law so that parents can exempt their children from school beatings simply adds another stage of | ||
| formality and regulation. | ||
| There is another important difference between home and school. As research into | ||
| child-rearing habits shows, parents generally smack younger children more than they smack older | ||
| 35 | ones; and they have the perfectly reasonable defence that, when a child's verbal reasoning ....... | |
| faculties are underd eveloped, it may be necessary to resort to physical argument. Few parents | ||
| would dream of beating a 13-year-old . In schools, it is the other way round: corporal punishment | ||
| is used most sparingly in infant schools, more commonly in the juniors and perhaps most | ||
| intensively in the early and middle years of secondary school. In other words, children are most | ||
| 40 | often beaten by teachers at exactly the time they are forming their adult personalities and models | |
| of behaviour. At that stage of life, schools should be pulling out all the stops to convince them | ||
| that reason and argument, not physical force, are the best ways of resolving differences. | ||
| Joseph 's Bill, duein the current session of parliament, is a political convenience, enabling him | ||
| to observe a European Court declaration that parental objections to corporal punishment must be | ||
| 45 | respected, while placating the pro-beating members of his party. | |
| Peter Wilby in The Sunday Times, December 9, 1984 |