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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

I didn't downmod you, but it wouldn't work. It's a typical engineer's solution, you know? Sure, if you have 1 bad nut in a collection of 10 nuts, you just throw it away. But that's politically impossible with humans. The newspapers and the electorate would destroy anyone who tried it. At best you might be able to steer the no-goodnicks into the basement for "special" classes, but you could never, ever make your real intentions known, and so you could never have a genuinely effective system for filtering.

The old-style solution was much simpler: The principal beat the kid. The kid would go home, and father would beat him a second time. This also doesn't work for similar reasons.

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I was paddled in public school and I'd say that works pretty well for maintaining order.

I am sorry to hear you had that experience. I do not approve of running a school, or any organization, based on fear, much less the threat of physical violence. Is this something that would be appropriate for the adult world? I don't think so. We shouldn't beat children just because they're smaller than us and can't fight back.

Meh.

While I never received physical punishment at school (I do believe it occasionally happened at my elementary school, I never got into that level of trouble there), I was occasionally spanked by my parents when I acted rotten. I don't resent my parents for it, in fact I think they're great people and love them very much. I knew at the time why I was receiving that punishment, and I'm mature enough enough now to respect them for it.

"I do not approve of running a school, or any organization, based on fear, much less the threat of physical violence." You've made a leap here that I don't think holds up. The fact that I could have received a spanking at school or that I did receive spankings at home doesn't mean either my school or my home was run "based on fear" or "the threat of physical violence." A spanking is essentially a last resort, and you know it. That's hardly "basing" anything on fear.

"We shouldn't beat children just because they're smaller than us and can't fight back." The line between basic corporal punishment of a kid who refuses to be reasonable and beating a child is a broad one. Equivocating may make your position feel superior, but it's not accurate.

That's not to say corporal punishment in the schools is a grand idea... in part because there are people out there who would enjoy hitting kids, and so screening for that kind of trait would be important. I don't get the feeling your statement was really based on any sort of reasonable accounting of those odds, though. I'd love to hear how you've arrived at your opinion regarding corporal punishment, though. It's not an unpopular one, so I don't think you're some kind of weirdo or something, I'd just be interested in knowing what kind of background you're coming from.

The problem with corporal punishment (in an Indian perspective) is, the highly underpaid teachers don't quite know when to stop beating the child. Almost every month, I hear about kids being beaten to death in schools in rural / semi-urban India, and the helpless parents can only wail as the justice system is so screwed up.

Seriously? It seems pretty easy to know how not to beat someone to death. It's very easy to inflict a lot of pain with only superficial injury - with a cane or paddle, for example.

It may be easy for you or for me, but there's not shortage of deranged teachers in rural India.

That really sucks if true. Like ericd says, however, I don't think you can beat someone to death when administering corporal punishment just because you "didn't quite know when to stop". I think you're giving the beater too much leeway.

I'm not really advocating the return of corporal punishment in American schools. It's such a political issue, and potential liability, that I have a hard time seeing it ever making a return.

Ya, this is definitely true. I can't attest to children being that beaten badly in India, but when I taught at an elementary school in the Himalayas beating the students was common place. The first day I walked into a classroom I was given a bamboo stick by the child in charge of the class.

First I tried not resorting to the stick, then I would scare the students with the stick (by swinging at them and missing or stopping just short or their body), but eventually they learned I wouldn't actually hit them. The class would occasionally get so bad that the child in charge of the class would go around and hit his own classmates.

Unfortunately they responded to the abuse and would quiet down.

I think it's all the culture. It goes back to how the parents discipline the kids and how primary school teachers discipline the students.

I don't believe in corporal punishment in any school, I think this problem can be solved in

"Is this something that would be appropriate for the adult world?"

Yes. We call them police, but instead of paddles, they have guns.

(Well, I guess in the U.K. they have a grown up kind of paddle?)

The fact that order is ultimately enforced with violence is an unpleasant constant of human societies.

In what fantasy-land do you live where a large majority of your life is not defined by the threat of physical violence and involuntary confinement?

Actually, you shouldn't beat children because they /can/ fight back. If you re-instated corporal punishment, schools in bad areas would be ridiculous almost immediately, and as soon as you get an out-of-control adult or a victimized-feeling student, someone is going to get a gun from their older cousin.

Besides, when was the last time you were in a high school? The teachers are mostly older women, who most definitely cannot afford to play a game of physical escalation with teenage boys.

Actually I'd be curious to see what would happen if corporal punishment was re-instated. I think your scenario derives from a hyperbolic world presented to us by a hype-machine media. I'm not sure it's really accurate. My hypothesis would be that it would in fact cut down on problems, though I won't deny that one or a few incidents like what you posit could happen. Truly "rotten apples", few in number as they may be, are in every part of the population. This is also why re-instating corporal punishment would be extra-hard -- there will be "rotten apples" doling it out, too.

Also, to address your second point, when I was in elementary school and a few kids did receive corporal punishment, it was always meted out by a principal, and not directly by the teacher.

I went to a public high school less than ten miles away from Richmond High (http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-27/justice/california.gang.r...), I may have a slightly skewed perspective. But on the other hand, I don't think corporal punishment would ever be an issue in richer school districts.

The part that scares me the most isn't the students though, it's the `adults'. The amount of evil and incompetence from the school board level down is astonishing. I wouldn't trust those people to take my order at a fast food restaurant.

Is this something that would be appropriate for the adult world?

Uhm, yes, except we call it the death penalty or, alternatively, life in prison.

I'm glad then that teachers don't go into engineering.

Another plane crashed today - one of the turbine blades was cracked but we decided to give it sensitivity training to get in touch with it's inner strength rather than callously replace it.

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