Two random things to pass onto you
Bookworm on Dec 17 2008 at 2:12 pm | Filed under: Children
I plowed through my inbox today, which is always an overwhelming task. Over the course of a week, I ended up with a 500 email backlog. Amongst those 500 emails, however, were a couple of treasures.
The first was information about a grassroots organization aimed at creating a coherent opposition to Obama’s wackier proposed projects. Check it out and see what you think about it.
The second, from a friend of mine who works in a public school district, is an open-letter to Obama asking him to prevent corporal punishment in America. The first thing that struck me about the letter was the weirdly homoerotic tone the letter took when describing corporal punishment. Instead of reading like an advocacy piece, it sounded like something the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, a noted masochist, would have written. Here’s the advocacy letter:
Typically, the child is required to assume a rump-presentation posture so as to facilitate being battered on his or her buttocks with a wooden board. In fact, this offers the punisher an unpatrolled avenue for sexual exploitation.
The letter also points out that teachers aren’t trained to administer corporal punishment, so that there are a lot of untrained corporal punishers out there. Don’t know why, but that made me laugh.
As for me, I think there is a gaping chasm between a spanking and a beating. I got a fair amount of spankings from my parents when I was growing up. I didn’t stop loving my parents, I didn’t fear my parents, and I didn’t turn into someone with bizarre S&M urges. What did happen, though, was that I very, very quickly learned the big no-nos in our house and didn’t do them any more. The result was a very peaceful home, especially because my parents weren’t simmering in a stew of frustrated, impotent anger.
By the way, I don’t spank my children, not because I don’t feel that, at least when they were younger, it wouldn’t have been useful, but because I don’t have any desire to be hauled off by Child Protective Services.
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8 Responses to “Two random things to pass onto you”
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Greetings:
I think I have a personal experience solution to your corporal punishment conundrum. In the seventh grade, I had Sister Mary Robert as my teacher. Besides being the largest Sister of Mercy in the World, Sister Robert possessed a strip of “Neo-lite” that went about 18″x4″. Now, for the uninitiated, Neo-lite was a man-made compound that was used as a replacement material when the original soles of shoes wore out. Sister Robert’s technique was to have the student come to the front of the class and extend his less useful hand out, palm up. At that point, Sister Robert would apply the material to the palm one, two or three times with a quick but downward motion.
There was something about that trip from your desk to the front of the classroom that was, how should I put it, spiritually cleansing in a way that many 12 or 13 years olds would not have otherwise experienced. Plus, there was the wonderful afterglow as your hand swelled with the warmth and love of effective discipline.
Heh. My early years were with the Holy Cross nuns, my high school years were with the Ursulines. I remember my mother telling me that she and my father had given the Holy Cross nuns written permission to spank me, and if I came home and told them I had been spanked, I’d probably get spanked again. Never happened (Though I remember stories about a 4th or 5th grade teacher who had a penchant for throwing books. Rumor had it that she heaved one at a student who ducked, and the book went through a window, breaking it and landing on the ground two stories down. I wasn’t there, so it could be just a story. Darn). The Ursulines never used physical discipline that I know of, though I had to do hand sewing for others as a result of the usual talking in class and general misbehaving which was usually running in the hallways and that sort of thing.
Seems like a lot of RCs instructed by the nuns show up here on this blog owned by a good non-observant Jewess! Does that tell us something? or not?
Is he by any chance referring to Polk Street in San Francisco?
Somehow, I don’t see this being added to the curriculum of our education schools in the near future.
I suppose the teachers could practice on each other first. Whoops! Don’t want to give anyone ideas.
Re corporal punishment in schools. I doubt that there are many public schools that practice it today. As a public school student, the only corporal punishment I received was on the losing end of fights with other students; by the same token I also administered corporal punishment.
The petition is more of the government can solve everything mentality of the left wing, the higher the level the better.Let it be worked out at the local level.
I was taught by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. They didn’t spank much at all, and were excellent teachers. Too bad they have totally weirded out. However if we did get spanked, we got another one from our parents for misbehaving in school.
Gringo is right. I don’t think many public schools spank today, and certainly not where Book is living. Think of the lawsuits from outraged parents.
I have mixed feeling on the subject. Corporal punishment was not at all unusual when I was in school. I experienced it a few times.
I don’t recall that the prospect ever deterred me from transgressing, but it did wonderfully focus my mind on the most recent episode.
When I was in college my fraternity seriously hazed pledges and one of the requirements of “hell week” was to have each brother sign your paddle–a broad two handed bit of wood–and he would seal the deal with a lick. As I recall, we had some fifty or so brothers at the time. This was a rough week, but all in all I think the pledges were proud to complete it and it may have contributed to bonding. The potential for serious injury was certainly present, and we all understood that it was important to approach a brother for his signature when he was sober. There were no serious injuries although there were some colorful posteriors by the end of the week. The paddle was also used to punish serious pledge transgressions. We were the last house on campus to behave so barbarically, but we were proud of our ‘tradition’. I suppose it is good that it has gone the way of most traditions.