In the small town of Cassville, Missouri, teachers will be allowed to hit their students starting next school year, provided the parents agree. Specifically, the students are to be hit on the buttocks with a wooden paddle if “all alternative means of disciplining have failed”.
What sounds like a return to the pedagogy of the 1950s is by no means an isolated case. In 19 US states, this practice is generally permitted in schools. Although corporal punishment is a violation of human rights according to the United Nations, the Supreme Court ruled as early as 1977 that caning in a school setting is constitutional, despite the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments.
In the court’s opinion, the amendment, historically intended to prevent the cruel punishment of prisoners, did not apply to corporal punishment in public schools. The states would have to decide for themselves whether to allow the beating of students. What is otherwise completely out of the question and even justiciable as bodily harm should therefore be a tried and tested remedy for children and young people who “disobey”?
This is not about a discussion about parenting styles – nor about the naively trivializing “I was not harmed by a spank either”. Anyone who speaks like that has obviously been harmed by the slap. Because it is about an inalienable and inviolable human right: bodily integrity. Punishment in the school context is nothing more than ritualized child abuse.
It also affects people who are particularly vulnerable and in need of protection. Experiences of violence, especially when the violence comes from people close to them, can be traumatic for children. They destroy trust, devalue, degrade and create the existentially frightening and long-lasting feeling of powerlessness. What remains is often anger and shame – but also the experience that physical violence is a legitimate means when fellow human beings do not behave as expected of them.
In short: It has been scientifically proven that children who are beaten up often turn into violent adults. The fact that conservative hardliners believe that it would not have harmed them and would not have been a problem in the past is a normative bogus argument. It neither takes into account those who undoubtedly suffered psychological damage from punishment, nor does it reflect the scientific and educational facts.
Punishment also encourages abuse of power, arbitrariness, and yes, even subtle or overt sadism. Who defines when “all alternative means of disciplining” have failed? Who controls how hard the hit is? The lack of alternatives and efficiency that proponents of punishment claim is an illusion.
Beatings don’t solve problems; at best, they shift them. A small person who adjusts their behavior out of fear of being hit is not only deprived of their freedom and dignity; Spanking is also not a sustainable method of parenting. Rather, it is conviction, reflection, positive experiences, and yes, if necessary, loving correction that form self-determined and free people.
Approval for brutal parenting methods also seems to be the result of a reactionary and pseudo-religious ideology that has become firmly entrenched in part of American society and is taking up more and more space. According to a survey in Cassville, it was mainly the students’ parents who were open to the punishment. Agreeing to ritualized abuse seems like a regression to the “good old days” when everything seemed to be in order. And at the same time it is a symptom of the demarcation from liberal and humanistic principles.
Corporal punishment, such as beating with a stick or paddle, has long been banned in democratic countries with less barbaric idiosyncrasies. The legal situation in the USA and the renewed ambitions to make punishment socially acceptable again are a painful step backwards in the generational task of banning violence from education.
