O’Brien1

Aidan O’Brien

Professor Bedell

English 137h

November 1st 2017

Ignoring a Child’s Pain: The Shift in Corporal Punishment

As American culture has evolved over time, one thing that’s been consistent with change has

been reluctance to accept it. Whether it’s been reluctance to accept changes to things like Civil

Rights, immigration, or even slavery, the common thread is that even if the object of the

proposed change was objectively horrible, in each case change has had to be drawn out and made

slower than it should as a result of stubbornness. Many dislike change and are unwilling to part

with the old way despite shifting public perception, and this is made no clearer than it is in the

example of Corporal Punishment in schools. From the 1980’s to the present, a clear shift in the

mindset of the common person towards corporal punishment in schools completely shifted,

mirroring a simultaneous ideological shift away from religious and historical context used to

educate, and ultimately resulting in the huge decline in corporal punishment’s use in schools

since 1980. However, despite the humungous decrease in its use and shift away from excessive

religious and historical context used to govern, corporal punishment in schools remains a staple

in 19 states. These states, mostly conservative, embody the resistance to change mentioned

above. Although evidence from every corner of the scientific community seems to conclude that

corporal punishment is detrimental to both education and children, this is yet again another

perfect example of how a change to eliminate corporal punishment, one which would

undoubtedly be beneficial to society at large, can instead be put off and ignored simply because
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it is convenient to do so. At this point, the United States is the last country in the western world

where corporal punishment in schools is legal, but to understand both the shifting and fixed

ideologies behind it that make this possible, it is important to first look at the origins of education

and corporal punishment in the United States.

In the United States, the earliest public schools began popping up around the mid-19th

century. At the time, much of Victorian style and society was popular in the States, and so its no

surprise that the influence of the Victorians and, in particular, their school system, was

instrumental in helping to form the United States’ own. This is where Americans adopted the

concept of corporal punishment, as it was already being ‘effectively’ employed in Victorian

society. For the Victorian society, corporal punishment was very much connected to their

Christian roots, and was devised from an old Christian image of the Roman Family, in which

children learned through “Discipline and Corporal Punishment”. The United States, being mostly

Christian itself and attempting to style its school system after an already established one, was

thus perfectly happy to take on the system of corporal punishment as well. Even in early

Victorian schools though, corporal punishment wasn’t always as popular as one might think.

Despite what might be assumed from how quickly the system was adopted, in the earliest

days of the Victorian educational system corporal punishment was actually a hotly debated point

among the parents of students and the teachers who employed it. The parents argued that the use

of corporal punishment, which included caning, smacking of the knuckles and even blows to the

head, was cruel and unnecessary. At the same time, many of the teachers argued it was necessary

to keep the classroom disciplined. Because many of the parents didn’t have hard evidence to

argue that corporal punishment was truly detrimental for their children, their argument became

one that was purely about morality. In Jacob Middleton’s article Spare the Rod, he cites liberal
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educationalist W.F Collier who in 1872 summed up this argument by saying “Do we wish some

future generation to call ours some barbarous age, and us their barbarous ancestors who flogged

their children, though we had abolished flogging among ourselves?”. This is very important,

because it shows that although internalization caused it to appear this way later on, corporal

punishment wasn’t always and indeed wasn’t ever something everyone approved of. For the

most part, though, the pleas of the parents fell on deaf ears. As more and more children

graduated from the system into positions of power and wealth, many were reluctant to change a

system that, in their eyes, had served its purpose to educate and make them successful. As a

result, the system was perpetuated, and within a generation began to be internalized, not just in

Victorian England but in the United States as well. As more and more schools implemented

corporal punishment, the stage was being set for a time when both a religious resurgence and the

peak of corporal punishment were well underway: The 1980’s.

As previously mentioned, the 1980’s was a period in which conservative and religious

thinking was very much on the rise. Ronald Reagan was elected president in part because he

espoused viewpoints embodying and emphasizing this religious resurgence on a national stage.

Now this not to say that Ronald Reagan and his views on religion directly lead to a rise in

corporal punishment, but it is to say that it indirectly helped lend it credibility as a method of

discipline in schools given the religious and historical context corporal punishment was

originally formed under, and indeed its use was through the roof. According to Randall in the

article Corporal Punishment in School, approximately 1.4 million students experienced corporal

punishment annually in 1981, some of the highest in history. However, around the mid 1980’s

beginning in 1985 and 1986, the script begins to flip on corporal punishment as new scientific

evidence helped to begin to shift the opinion of the general public.

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In 1981, the same year cited above as the one where 1.4 million children experienced corporal

punishment, ABC News conducted a survey in which they found that only 54% of the American

population actually approved of corporal punishment in schools, meaning that 46% were

disapproving or unsure. This is important because it shows that, although it had been repressed to

some degree, many people still were diametrically opposed to corporal punishment at the time

when it was being utilized the most. However, they were still being met with the same argument

as many of the first parents to protest, which was simply that corporal punishment was necessary

for disciplinary purposes, and that it ultimately the system validated itself through the success of

the people who graduated from it. But, beginning in 1985, studies like the ones published by the

Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire began to directly link corporal

punishment at home and at school to things like having a lower IQ, being more anti-social, and

having increased depression and suicidal thoughts even as an adult. This was the precisely the

rallying cry that many parents needed, and it was because of this evidence that the practice of

corporal punishment was first truly called into question in the eyes of policy-makers.

This new evidence from The Family Research Laboratory and others weighed heavily on both

parents and the scientific community, and many pediatricians began to advise even the

staunchest supporters of corporal punishment to consider making something else their primary

means of discipline. This was key to affecting the use of corporal punishment in schools, as

parents less likely to employ corporal punishment on their own kids then were less likely to

approve of its own use in schools. In 1993, the results of a survey referenced by B.A Robinson in

his article The History of Corporal Punishments shows exactly how huge this shift was, as from

1962 to 1993 the use of corporal punishment as the primary method of discipline among parents

had fallen 40% from 59% to 19%. Because of the growing amount of people against corporal
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punishment and new scientific evidence backing them, policy makers were already beginning to

adjust laws around corporal punishment in their respective states by mandating a parental

consent form, or in some cases eradicating it altogether. By 1991, only 10 years after the use of

corporal punishment schools was at an all-time high, all this amounted to the number of children

experiencing corporal punishment in schools falling by almost 900,000 children annually to

around 500,000 annually and was continuing to drop.

Throughout the remainder of the 90’s, the use of corporal punishment in schools continued to

drop as the United States approached the present day. With scientific evidence to back up the

statements of angry parents, the 1990’s continued this shift away from the sort of religious and

historical justification of corporal punishment to a newer stance that was grounded in evidence

and logic. As more evidence came out to corroborate the main points outlined by The Family

Research Society, more and more states found reason to abolish corporal punishment in schools.

Those opposed to eliminating corporal punishment under the pretense that it inspired better

education were met with cases of states like New Jersey, in which corporal punishment had been

eliminated since the 1870’s, and which has consistently been one of the leaders in public

education. By the end of the 1990’s, significant progress had been made, with only 23 ‘paddling’

states remaining. However, in the last 18 years progress to eliminate corporal punishment in

schools has more than plateaued, with only 4 more states opting to eliminate it from their

schools. This is the reluctance mentioned in the first paragraph, and is very problematic as it

represents both a deep political divide in the United States, and a tendency to ignore the pain of

others in favor of what seems easy or traditional.

As previously stated, the reluctance of those in United States society to change what has

become so rooted in their culture is the main reason corporal punishment in schools is still being
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perpetuated in 19 states. In the 1980’s, its true that there was a moral majority in favor of

corporal punishment in schools, but now this is no longer the case. According to a recent pole by

ABC news, among all adults with children polled, 72% say that teachers shouldn’t be allowed to

spank their students, and among just the adults who spank their own children, 67% still think a

teacher shouldn’t have the same right. In addition to the fact that public opinion has shifted

drastically in the other direction, even more data has come out to further support the idea that

corporal punishment serves no real purpose in education. According to WalletHub’s rankings of

public education in the 50 states, 15 of the 19 states where corporal punishment in schools is

legal rank in the bottom 20 for public education. On top of that, the state with highest dropout

rate, lowest median ACT scores, and 2nd highest percentage of threatened or injured students on

WalletHub (Mississippi) is also the state credited in numerous other studies including one for

TIME magazine for being the one where the use of Corporal Punishment is still the most

common at around 7.5% of students receiving physical discipline. This is consistent with the

aforementioned study by The Family Research Society where they concluded that children

receiving corporal punishment had on average lower IQ’s than those that weren’t. If anything,

the data suggests that corporal punishment seems to inhibit the learning process, which should

come as a surprise to no one. When all of this information is out there, in addition to all scientific

studies and research connecting the use of corporal punishment to increased aggression,

depression, and thoughts of suicide, it becomes very easy to see that corporal punishment no

longer has any place in any school in the United States.

So why, then, do a reported 110,000 students as of 2013-2014 according to EducationWeek

still receive corporal punishment each year? In a word: Tradition. Of the 19 states where corporal

punishment is still legal, almost all of them are historically very conservative states, and most of
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them are located in the South, where there is an extra added emphasis on history and traditional

American culture more than almost anywhere else. Corporal Punishment, as distasteful as it

sounds, is as American a tradition as anything else, with many parents signing consent forms to

allow and some kids even opting for it in place of things like in school suspension. Some will

argue that this is plenty fair enough, but this doesn’t make the system any less inhumane. Just

look at the case of Tim L, a fifth grader who in 2003 had to have his mother help remove the pair

of underwear he had been wearing after a paddling because it was covered in dried blood. In

today’s society, this is called child abuse, not tradition, and there is no amount of tradition that

can erase the very real scars corporal punishment in schools can leave on children both

physically and psychologically.

In America, typically what inspires change is the opinion of the public majority. In the case of

corporal punishment in schools, the perception has now done a complete 180 from how it was

viewed in the 80’s, with the vast majority of Americans being against what has been a dark facet

of our school system since its earliest days. Still, though, hundreds of students across the United

States are paddled in schools every day, almost under the nose of the very public that so

decisively is opposed to this type of treatment. Yes, states are slowly moving to abolish corporal

punishment and yes, tons of progress has been made on that front, but there will always be a

huge, abusive caveat in that progress until the system is completely terminated. In the words of

W.F Collier: “Do we wish some future generation to call ours some barbarous age, and us their

barbarous ancestors who flogged their children, though we had abolished flogging among

ourselves?”. Who are the barbarians now?

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Works Cited:

“8th Grader Paddled for Wrting Trump on Chalkboard.” Youtbube, CBS42 News, 17 Nov. 2016,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pUQbloKPmA.

ABC News/Washington Post. ABC News/Washington Post Poll, Sep, 1981 [survey question].

USABCWP.38A.R35. ABC News/Washington Post [producer]. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: Roper Center

for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL [distributor], accessed Nov-6-2017.

Analysis, and Julie Crandall. “Poll: Most Approve of Spanking Kids.” ABC News, ABC News

Network, 8 Nov. 1970, abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90406&page=1#.UGfE_hifu_E.

Bernando, Richie. “2017s States With the Best Public Schools.” WalletHub.com, WalletHub, 31

July 2017, www.wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/.

Clark, Jess. “Where Corporal Punishment Is Still Used in Schools, Its Roots Run Deep.” NprED,

12 Apr. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/04/12/521944429/where-corporal-punishment-is-still-

used-its-roots-go-deep.

Cohen, Adam. “Why Is Paddling Still Allowed in Schools?” TIME, TIME, 1 Oct. 2012,

ideas.time.com/2012/10/01/should-paddling-be-allowed-in-schools/.

Fleming, Sandy. “How Has Child Discipline Changed?” LiveStrong.com, The LiveStrong

Foundation, 28 Dec. 2015, www.livestrong.com/article/31506-child-discipline-changed/.

Kennedy, Robert. “2 Major Reasons for Banning Corporal Punishment.” ThoughtCo, 6 Mar. 2016,

www.thoughtco.com/reasons-for-banning-corporal-punishment-2773347.
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Lee, Jennifer A. “Mother's Spanking of 3 Year Old Childrenand Subsequent Risk of Child's

Aggressive Behavior.” Child Welfare Information Gateway, May 2010,

www.childwelfare.gov/topics/can/defining/disc-abuse/.

Middleton, Jacob. “Spare the Rod.” History Today, 11 Nov. 2012, www.historytoday.com/jacob-

middleton/spare-rod.

“Paddling Video Sparks Corporal Punishment Discussion.” Youtube, CNN, 16 Apr. 2016,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPpI-G0MFdw.

Robinson, B.A. “Child Corporal Punishment: Spanking.” Religious Tolerance, Ontario Consultants

on Religious Tolerance, 30 May 2009, www.religioustolerance.org/spankin5.htm.

Wolfson, Esther Boylan. “Is Hitting an Appropriate Form of Child Discipline.” Whole Family, 18

Sept. 2000, www.wholefamily.com/parent-center/scroller/is-hitting-an-appropriate-form-of-child-

discipline.