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
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.