Texas city revives paddling as it takes a swat at misbehavior

TEMPLE, TEX. -- In an era when students talk back to teachers, skip class and wear ever-more-risque clothing to school, one central Texas city has hit upon a deceptively simple solution: Bring back the paddle.

Most school districts across the country banned paddling of students long ago. Texas sat that trend out. Nearly a quarter of the estimated 225,000 students who received corporal punishment nationwide in 2006, the latest figures available, were from the Lone Star State.

But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Without paddling, "there were no consequences for kids," said Steve Wright, who runs a construction business and is Temple's school board president.

Since paddling was brought back to the city's

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/15/AR2010041505964.html?g=0

:spank:

Words fail me. . . how stupid can people be. really. how. f'ing. stupid!

:banghead:

And one our country practices with great gusto: Redemptive violence.

H.L. Mencken was right about simple, neat solutions to complex problems.

It went by kind of fast (on Ratigan's show), but it looked to me like it was all of the red states. It was the entire South, then reaching out into most of the West, with a little arm reaching up to snare Indiana, just like on the red-state blue-state map.

I wonder how exact the overlap is. It's fascinating to observe the way that conservatives turn to violence first in every single realm of their lives (as Cenk mentioned).

Apologies to a few decent people who live there

MARION INDIANA 1930




Lynching 1930

A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse doors to get at these two young blacks accused of raping a white girl; the girl’s uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the man’s innocence. Although this was Marion, Ind., most of the nearly 5,000 lynchings documented between Reconstruction and the late 1960s were perpetrated in the South. (Hangings, beatings and mutilations were called the sentence of “Judge Lynch.”)

When the coach would ask him if he wanted one swat now or three after school, Jack would say "three now."

the more hard-headed ones. Who are, probably, some of "those" people...

And if you think this won't lead us back to this read The Shame of the Nation, or pretty much any book on education by Jonathon Kozol, and you would understand why this was dropped.

And if that wasn't enough, we have studies that show antisocial behavior and aggression results from such treatment. It might settle them
down while they are in front of you, but later on those same shots with the paddle become cruelty to other people or animals.

Are the administrators too clueless, or spineless, or ignorant to defend these kids?

And is the kid that is hungry, coming from a family with an alchoholic mother or father who beats them, or one who is homeless far more
likely to be the one "acting out", and thus punished?

And they said this was a few parents asking for this? Was it the parents disadvantaged by income? While parents with some money could move away, some of those parents won't have a chance. And neither will the kids.

Didn't Texas want to secede from the Union? If we got enough signatures could we just boot them out?

It drove us underground and we did some BAAAAAAAAD things and never got caught.

The Drama of the Gifted Child

For Their Own Good

Thou Shalt Not be Aware

Read John Bradshaw's books for a simplified and more detailed explanation of Alice Miller's ideas:

Healing the Shame that Binds You
Bradshaw on The Family
Homecoming - Reclaiming your Inner Child

That and Ashley Montagu's "Touching: the human significance of the skin"


The full text of the Alice Miller's book "For Your Own Good" is at this link with the permission of the author

For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
http://nospank.net/fyog.htm

Kids who are punished too much just get sneakier and do worse and worse things. Getting caught was no deterrent after a while, because we were going to be paddled whether we were bad or not. So, after a while, it didn't really matter to us either way.

We had been beat so much, that we didn't care any more. We just did what we wanted after "that moment" of realization that the beatings were a daily fact of life whether we were bad or not. I'll never forget "that moment."

How interesting.

At my schools, we were beaten so much that we knew it didn't matter if we were good or bad. After being beaten for so long and so much, it became a daily fact of life that we were going to be beaten. So, we just did whatever the fuck we wanted anyhow.

Most of us were strung out on drugs and getting into worse and worse trouble by the time we graduated. Pain and pleasure were indiscernible by then. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. We were dead inside, the light gone from our eyes. We no longer cared. Still don't.