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Tuesday 9 December 2008

School punishment.

School punishment which may include a cane, a belt, a leather strip or a sandshoe (a common footwear in the U.K. not completely unlike a trainer which where worn mainly while doing indoor sports), is in the news again via this report on the Daily Telegraph web site.

I must admit I do not read that web site very often due in part to the fact it is a newspaper similar in style and reporting as many of the Sunday newspapers. This means it is full of incredulous, at best, stories about nothing much but do incur on the side of sensationalism.

That said, the fact that they report that Gordon Brown, the U.K.'s P.M., and his predecessor to that same title Mr Tony Blair, where both given cooperate punishment while at school. Anyone whose school years where previous to 1980 or so will know that such punishments for schoolchildren were the norm. Well, the norm for those who suffered such a thing. Some many times.

The point I am trying to make here is that due to the two aforementioned peoples disciplinary status while at school and their  subsequent rise in their chosen working life to the very pinnacle it goes against the oft held idea that such punishments only create a bad child  who later in life during his or her adult phase will commit crimes. Perhaps a politician can be said to have committed many crimes during their tenure at the House of Commons but that is something I care not to comment on.

If such punishments that have been claimed to create heinous thinking adults then why are some of todays schoolchildren, who have never had the threat of such punishments hanging over their collective heads, the most unruly bunch ever to grace our school system? Surely, given the benefit of hinesight that all people of the future have on what is happening now or that the people alive now have over events that preceded their lifes, it can clearly be seen that corperate punishment works in s much as when compared to unruly schoolchildren of today against those who where schoolchildren in the years before such punishments where deemed nasty.

I do not care about any rights for children not when the adults of those children are legally held accountable for whatever the child gets up to. This seems a lopsided arrangement to me and because of that children, while I do not and cannot advocate beating them, should have no rights at all. Parents should have total and absolute control over their childrens upbringing and the child should have no say in how those adults go about the business of bring up their own child. If that means allowing adults the option to allow their child to be admonished in whatever way the school sees fit, which may include corporal punishment, then so be it.

I well remember getting home one day and telling my mother I had had the cane for beating up another child and my mothers response was to use her slipper to meter out more punishment because I had been given the cane at school. A few days later a letter from my school arrived and after reading it she gave me yet more punishment "for the shame you have inflicted on me". That is how it should be.


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