Tomorrow, April 30, is International Day to End Corporal Punishment, known here in the U.S. as National Spank Out Day.
During Spank Out Day, parents, care-givers and teachers are encouraged not to spank children for a whole day. Imagine that, huh?
While it’s hard to establish a cause-and-effect relationship of Spank Out Day and the decrease in corporal punishment in our schools, the number of states that still allow corporal punishment in public schools had dropped from 30 to 19 since the Spank Out Day campaign began in1998.
But the idea hasn’t gained much traction in the South, and nowhere is that more evident than here in Mississippi where the rod is rarely spared.
Mississippi accounted for one-quarter of all school paddlings, according to a 2019 report by The Southern Poverty Law Center and UCLA based on data collected from the 2013-2014 school year.
The report showed that Black boys are about twice as likely to receive corporal punishment as white boys, and Black girls are three times as likely as white girls. In more than half of the schools that practice corporal punishment, educators hit students with disabilities at a higher rate than those without disabilities.
Within the schools that practice corporal punishment, about 5.6 percent of students were struck during the 2013-14 school year, but that rate was 9.3 percent in Mississippi, easily the highest rate in the nation. Nearly half (43.8 percent) of all Black girls receiving corporal punishment in schools were Mississippi kids.
Such disparities are troubling, because other research shows that Black students do not misbehave more than white students. That alone should be enough to end corporal punishment in our schools.
The Columbus Municipal School District and the Starkville Oktibbeha Consolidated School District do not allow corporal punishment in their schools. The Lowndes County School District does not have a district-wide policy, although the LCSD schools that do allow corporal punishment require parental consent.
In both 2020 and 2021, bills to either end corporal punishment altogether or require parental consent before a student could be paddled died in legislative committees, which tells us much about the public perception of corporal punishment.
I don’t get it, even though I grew up in an age when paddling and spankings were almost universally embraced. I got my fair share of spankings at home and paddlings at school, but I can’t say it did much to change my behavior in any profound way.
Back then, it was fairly common for a kid to get paddled at school, so there was no particular shame in it and, as I recall, very little resentment.
But certainly times have changed. For today’s children, being paddled is humiliating, degrading and erodes trust in teachers. Why? Because paddling actually is humiliating, degrading and harmful to the student-teacher relationship.
I’ve held this view for years and have often debated the merits of spankings and paddlings with those who are convinced that corporal punishment is vital to raising well-behaved children. Spare the rod and spoil the child, they say.
I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard from pro-spanking adults:, “I was spanked and look how I turned out.” I’ve always avoided the urge to respond, “Look, I know you. The argument you are making is not as strong as you imagine it to be.”
The truth is there is no real link between spanking and behavior. Some kids are spanked as children and grow up to be wonderful adults. Some are spanked and wind up in prison. I was among the latter, of course. Prison is a place where regrets are constant companions, yet I never heard one inmate say he regretted not being hit more often as a child.
Usually pro-spanking folks are eager to stress that spankings are necessary only when all else fails.
When I hear that, it’s clear to me that spanking occurs when “all else” hasn’t been tried.
Children need discipline, certainly, but hitting a child is not discipline and isn’t likely to achieve what true discipline produces.
If that were true, logic dictates that the practice would not end in high school, but continue on into adulthood. In fact, you could make a better argument for paddling adults since we are “old enough to know better.”
Imagine such a scenario.
“I’m sorry Mr. Smith, but you missed your quarterly sales goal. Now, bend over the desk here while I fetch out Ol’ Woody.”
An adult simply wouldn’t put up with that. It would be humiliating and degrading and deeply offensive. Should a child somehow feel otherwise?
I hope that parents, teachers, coaches and all others with children in their care will observe Spank Out Day on Saturday…and continue observing it on all the days to follow.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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