Should Corporal Punishment Be Re-introduced Into Schools

Essay, Research Paper

I believe that Corporal

Punishment should not be re-instated in schools for many reasons. In the

following essay I will give those reasons and explain why others are incorrect. There is a law about

inflicting pain on others, and it is there for a reason. This is because it

degrades the person being hit, it makes them feel lesser, more inferior than

the person that is hitting them. If you go up to someone in the street and hit

them, the police can charge you with assault. Things should not be any

different in schools. You would just be allowing licensed assault. It is the wrong way,

in my opinion, to enforce order. I think that consent, and the respect that

pupils have for teachers should enforce order. The teacher out of good teaching

should earn this respect, not because the pupil is scared of him or her. Order

should be enforced by a person?s free will to want to do something, not out of

the fear of being hit. Look at Nazi Germany and how they turned out, they are

not ruling Europe now are they? This has been demonstrated world-wide, with

facist dictatorships and order enforced by threat of death always failing. The

best, and I think only way to enforce order properly is through a persons want

to do the correct thing. Corporal punishment would undermine this greatly. Should not the

punishment fit the crime? If you forget your schoolbook, it is a little unfair

to be hit for it. By doing this you are blowing the wrongdoing out of

proportion. The child could do much worse things than. Detention is a much

better idea, as the child is paying for what they have done, and they are

learning something at the same time. If corporal punishment

is administered to a child, it will affect the schoolwork produced by that

child and those around him or her. They will all be afraid of when they will

get their next beating and therefore they will never be concentrating on the

lesson properly. They will be in constant fear all the time; this is not the

correct way to bring up a child. Following on from this point, a child who goes

to school expecting to be beaten, will very soon decide that it may be in their

best interests not to go to school. This means truancy, and others will copy

it. Therefore the child will not be properly educated and it will affect his or

her job prospects in the future. If this happens to many children it will

affect the whole of modern day society, causing a collapse in the economy and

an increase in the level of crime. People may see

corporal punishment as a good deterrent, but in some cases it can do quite the

opposite. In fact one theory holds that ?severe corporal punishment can lead to

an increase in the likelihood of further crimes. Also if the child is beaten by

their teacher, who some may see as a role model. It will not only degrade that

child?s picture of their role model, but the child may then think it alright to

do the same to others, this means that there will be more scenes of violence

inside and outside of school. It has been proved that

if corporal punishment is inflicted harshly on a child that it can lead to

severe mental and physical damage. This is far from the point of a child going

to school for. A child goes to school to be educated; it should not be the

school?s job to discipline the child. That should be done at home in a method

decided by the child?s parents. It is not that

bringing back corporal punishment would be a bad idea, if it had been put

forward ten years ago, but times have drastically changed and society could not

cope with it being brought back now. The only reason that all these previously

stated points exist is because things are seen so much differently now than

they were all that time ago. It is just too late to bring it back.