Corporal punishment (Coursework Sample)

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23rd April 2011
Title: Corporal punishment
Basically, corporal punishment is causing pain or discomfort to a student by an educational personnel and especially the teacher for committing certain things that are against the school rules and regulations (American Academy of Pediatrics 162). This kind of punishment can be done in many different ways. The most common ones are slapping, pinching, choking, canning, denial of privileges such as bathing and forcing someone to stay in an uncomfortable confinement place. At other time force may be used to prevent a student from injuring someone else, destroying school property or snatching him/her a dangerous weapon. This cannot be termed as corporal punishment.
Taking a glance into the matter of corporal punishment, my instincts are for the view that it should be abolished in all the public schools. It’s true to say that corporal punishment has been passed on from one generation to another since an unusually long time. Those people that have been subjected to it in the earlier generation might be for the opinion that it is a convenient way to instill behavioral changes to the students. But again this issue of corporal punishment is more or less equivalent to the case of women in the early days and nowadays. There before people took women to be inferior and weak in the fields that were meant to be for men but nowadays it has proved to be otherwise. The same case applies to the case of corporal punishment that should not be justified at all.
To begin with, corporal punishment is widely used by educational personnel’s in the school compounds. At times the parents might be called to listen to cases of their children and the y end up subjecting their children to corporal punishment in the school compound too in an attempt to display responsibility to the educational personnel’s. This is however not the right way to bring up their children. It lowers the child’s esteem as well as the morale to pursue education (Benatar 240). The student takes it as though he/she is being oppressed from all the directions owing in mind that the teachers that are a part of the educational team are not going to spare the in as far as corporal punishment is concerned.
Research has already shown that most of the teachers and parents prefer corporal punishment to other disciplinary actions due to a number of negative reasons. These reasons explain why corporal punishment should be kicked out of all public schools. One of them is that they find it efficient in relieving their tension. This means that they use it to satisfy their own needs and not exactly assisting or disciplining the children. Besides that, during other times, they are unable to give explanations to certain social situations occurring in the lives of the children and thus end up using the wrong way of guiding their kids which is corporal punishment. Another reason is that they cannot contain their emotions. May be the children did something that made them immensely upset and instead of controlling the anger, they pour it all onto the children by administering certain forms of corporal punishment. All these are unethical and wrong.
Looking at corporal punishment from a different perspective, it is a way of instilling discipline in students through fear (Benatar 240). This paves way to the fact that corporal punishment is the basic cause of a number of negative effects in the lives of those students subjected to it. The first one is that it lowers their capacity to turn out to be responsible people in the future. Other people argue in the opposite angle. They say that corporal punishment instills the sense of responsibility in the minds of students of which is not the case. Frankly, when students are subjected to corporal punishment, they do not consider what could have been the right way to act to avoid being punished. Instead they look at the point that they are victims. Additionally, corporal punishment lowers the students’ self-esteem. To arrive to this, the students get to learn lack of self control being taught to them when their teachers are unable to control their anger and subject them to corporal punishment.
In addition to that, it makes the students victims. Back in the days when corporal punishment was highly recommended, people believed that it prepared them for life and made them stronger (American Academy of Pediatrics 163). But nowadays people know that corporal punishment does not make them stronger. What it does is rendering the students susceptible to it prone to doing the same mistake they were punished for again. It makes them feel that they are hard to withstand the kind of punishment administered to them for yet another time. There is also the issue of distorting the study process of the students. When a student is physically punished, his/her emotions are guaranteed to get hurt as well as the intellectual part of their lives. This way the students are not able to regain their morale and speed in learning for a certain period of time. The length of time is different for different students.
As far as the relationship between behaviors and their consequences are concerned, the use of corporal punishment acts as a barrier to the reasoning and understanding capability of the students (American Academy of Pediatrics 343). Punishing the students physically does not give them the required exposure to realize for themselves the negative outcomes of certain uncouth behaviors they take on in their lives. It as well breaks off the emotional ties between the students and their teachers (Benatar 240). You find that the students cannot look upon their teachers for advice, guidance and mentorship. The communication relationship between them becomes destroyed as the students cannot place any trust in their teachers. This way corporal punishment acts as a hindrance to the interaction needed for learning purposes between students and the educational personnel’s in public schools.
Alongside these kinds of negative effects of corporal punishment is the fact that it leaves the students with feelings of loneliness, being abandoned and annoyance (Hyman and Perone 245). They can feel totally left out and thus begin experiencing difficulties coping up with school life. It might again boil down to a negative attitude in the students towards other people in the society including their parents. With such a situation, the students are made to live in a world of their own because they are either afraid or hate the idea of associating themselves with other members of their societies. This yields the lack of social interaction skills in most of the students that are subjected to corporal punishment in their schools. The same way the students feel so angry and even contemplate on refusing to go to school and also run away from their homes because the life they are leading is not making them happy. Surely schools should not create such scenarios for the students by allowing the use of corporal punishment.
On the other hand, physical punishment does not teach students to act according to authority (Hyman and Perone 245). It teaches them to comply with the rules and regulations set for them to follow in school. With such an understanding in life, the students get to further their knowledge that violence is also a way of solving problems and issues in life. This now turns into a case where teachers and other school administrators are seen to teach violence to students (Hyman and Perone 245). These senses of violence are later passed to the generations in the society. This is an indication that the students who will succeed their teachers in the future are possibly going to subject and also teach violence of a very high level to the students of future generations. The only way to stop such an occurrence that would be a nightmare to most of the people is by driving corporal punishment out of all public schools.
Although people say that corporal punishment in public schools is not severe and that it cannot do any harm to the students, at times the physical punishment goes out of hand leaving the student with severe injuries (Irwin 819). The supporters of corporal punishment try to put it that such cases are extremely rare and that there is always room for error to any human activity but the kind of picture it brings out to the society is not a welcoming one. This is why corporal punishment should be abolished in all public schools especially with recognition that such cases are bound to rise as time continues to elapse.
Again the use of corporal punishment in school may result in feelings of anxiety and guilt in the teachers using against the students. This might lower their ability to teach in and interact with the students because they consider themselves not accepted by their students. At times the same feelings extend to the parents who might have contributed to the punishment of their kids by reporting certain behaviors to the t...