Spánking as punishment

 

Jeffrey St. Clair 

A school district in Missouri has reinstated spanking as punishment. The principal explained that: “Parents have said ‘why can’t you paddle my student?’ and we’re like ‘We can’t paddle your student, our policy does not support that. There had been conversation with parents and there had been requests from parents for us to look into it.”

+ Corporal punishment is, of course, yet another a grisly instance of religious practice infecting the public sphere. Fetuses are pure, but children are born into a state of sin. They are guilty of something sinister from their first breath and must of have “goodness” and “morality” whipped into them.

+ This is the educational mentality that Jean-Jacques Rousseau sought to demolish. Children, Rousseau argued, were born innocent and had the evils of society beaten into them: “Let us lay it down as an inconvertible rule that the first impulses of Nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart. The how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced.” (I doubt Emile or the Social Contract are on the approved reading lists in Missouri schools these days. Ironically, the Divine Jean-Jacques, himself, wouldn’t even have permitted libraries in schools, believing that the reading of all books (with the notable exception of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) had a pernicious effect on the mental development of children before the age of 15.)

+ Here’s A.S. Byatt’s description of the disciplinary torments inflicted on students at Christ’s Hospital, the public school attended by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the essayist Charles Lamb (Elia): “Lamb gives a vivid picture of the inhumanities of punishments at the school. At the age of seven, on his first day there, he saw a boy in fetters–the punishment for running away­. If a boy ran away for the second time he was put in the dungeons–‘little square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length on straw and a blanket…with a peep of light let in askance from a prison orifice at top, barely enough to read by.’ Boys were kept there day and night–the porter brought bread and water but was forbidden to speak: the beadle came twice a week to administer the ‘periodical chastisement.’ If a boy ran away a third time he was expelled after a state of flogging in front of all of his schoolfellows. ‘Scourging after the old Roman fashion, long and stately.’ Lamb felt, he says, very sick.” (Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time)