Turning over a new leaf with new schools director Dr. Pedro Garcia may mean turning over the paddle for Metro educators.Garcia informed the school board last week that he will recommend the elimination of corporal punishment from the system. Paddling isn't the only way to discipline. He told board members he hopes to bring a formal proposal for the ban sometime later for their approval.
The new school director's plans should provide a timely debate on this sometimes divisive issue. Just last week, discussion at the American Psychological Association convention centered on a new study on corporal punishment at home, which concluded that mild to moderate spanking by parents had no detrimental effects on a child. Other psychologists, however, argued that the practice is harmful.
Yet the issue here isn't home discipline, but school discipline, and as such, other factors come into play. Metro began requiring parental consent forms in 1997 to be allowed to spank children as a form of discipline. At the same time, the board issued guidelines on how administrators dealt paddlings.
Nevertheless, any time a teacher or administrator takes up a paddle, they invite questions of whether the punishment was warranted and whether it was too severe.
More basically, corporal punishment within the school teaches children that people in authority, like school principals, hold on to their power through force and violence.
Paddling is not only inappropriate, it's counterproductive.
In the wake of a spate of school violence over the last decade, schools have been trying to teach students about alternatives to violence. It makes little sense to use a paddle or anything else against a student when the system is trying to teach children to resolve their differences in nonviolent ways.
Apparently, Garcia has something else in mind himself. ''I think it's a pretty sad commentary when our only means of disciplining students is by hitting them,'' he told the board. He called for a more ''civilized'' approach. That's always preferable.
Another step forward in the South, the stronghold of school paddling in the U.S. I hope the Tennessee readers of this article will send letters to the editor supporting the paper's stance, and the new School Director, and will call on the Tennessee Legislature to do the same, statewide. And by the way, the research study presented at the recent meeting of the American Psychological Association, referenced in the editorial: [a] represented the work and opinion of one psychologist, known to be pro-spanking -- it is not an APA position; [b] the study was unpublished, and so seriously flawed that it will never likely be published; [c] it studied kids in a child counseling center by reading records that were 21 to 33 years old; [d] there were only 79 spanked kids, and only a tiny 4 non-spanked kids in the study -- too small to draw even the simplest of conclusions. Bob Fathman, 9/4/01
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