Once upon a time--not so long ago--disciplining children at school was easy: the teacher hit them with a paddle, smacked them in the face, pinched them, pulled them by the ears or hair, locked them up in a dark closet, and abused them verbally. By and large, the system worked: children learned how to toe the line. Times have changed. Today, pupils and students abuse and sometimes knife or shoot their teachers. Teachers react with fear and confusion. They tend to think that perhaps a majority of children are educationally handicapped, afflicted with behavior and emotional problems, or with genetic or mental infirmities, and certainly with dysfunctional families. Or they are just plain thugs. And doubtlessly, many are.
Psychologists studied this sad situation. They worked with dogs and mice, and came to the conclusion that the surest way to obtain compliance from a subject--be it canine, rodent, or human--was through inducing fear (what our grandparents already knew). They also discovered that conditioned fear was morbid and destructive of personal and social growth, that it interfered with effective solutions of reality-problems, that it bred total passivity or total aggressivity (whether latent or expressed). Many, if not most, criminals have a childhood background of physical and psychological abuse, of perverse fathers and resigned mothers.
So, the pendulum swung, and children inherited the era of laissez-faire, of abandonment of parental and social responsibility, and of suspicion that to discipline was to show the adults' inability to obtain compliance through more humane and civilized means, that to seek compliance through punishment--however benign--was to deprive children of their ego and identity, of their natural rights to "express themselves", of their democratic freedoms. Teachers were now in a bind. A great many still are. To spank or not to spank: that is the question. Whether 't is nobler to let th...