I wouldn't be able to do it and I wouldn't have the heart to send some kid down to the office to let it happen. This might be because I work in high school, but I would much rather talk to the kid, explain why what they are doing is wrong, and occasionally give the hairy eyeball.
Let me ask another question: Let's assume that corporal punishment works and that it would be an effective way of making your child more obedient to authority. No arguments, no debate, just learn to obey if you don't want to get hit. Is that actually an outcome you want?
Strawman. There's a huge difference between remaining respectful of authority and blindly following whatever they say in fear of physical repercussions. For example, I don't think anyone is advocating a whipping if Susie questions her teacher when the teacher says that latitudinal lines run up and down on the globe. I would advocate whipping if Susie called her teacher a stupid no-map reading bitch who needs to take her narrow ass back to state school.
Guys, remember - It's not the teachers running round willy nilly beating kids. It's the school's policy to offer it as a form of discipline, and to leave it up to the parents to determine if/when it can be used or not. The school has to notify the parents prior to administering a paddling, and if the parent doesn't agree that it's a paddle-worthy offense, the school can't use it. It's completely up to the parents. The school can't even recommend that a parent allow the school to paddle. The school has to say we can do x, y, or z. It's up to you guys.
Does the delay between offense and punishment not cause the punishment to lose some, if not most, of its bite? I was never hit at school, but the few times I was spanked by a parent as a child it was a swift, immediate repercussion for a known transgression. I'm not seeing how paddling someone two hours later works well. Also, the age of the kids in some of these articles took me by surprise. I think if you haven't learned consequence as a teenager, you might not have much hope. I don't know any effective parents who spank their kids after the age of six or so - once they get old enough to reason logically, doesn't that kind of consequence lose its meaning?
Not really, there's something to be said for dreading punishment. There's a discussion to go along with the paddling. It's really up to the parents.
Hahahahaha. I honest to God laughed out loud at that. While I agree with your distinction, I'm not convinced it's a strawman. On reflection, I think we're talking about different children. My friends and I were never the type of kids who would have called a teacher a bitch; we were more likely to call them out on lazy lesson planning and the use of discredited pedagogical practices. (Yeah, I grew up in a household of academics with PhDs in education; to say I was underwhelmed by the intellectual capacity of most of my teachers is a slight understatement.) My lack of respect for a lot of my teachers was never based on their ability to punish me; they had punishments that worked just fine. I didn't respect them because I thought many of them were only about one chapter of a textbook ahead of their students in terms of their understanding of the subject matter. The older I get and the more of my social circle I see wander into teaching as a fallback career when their first plans didn't work out, the more accurate I think this is. The teachers I respected, who genuinely enjoyed the subject matter and the teaching of it to kids, never needed corporal punishment to instill respect in their students. All that said, would corporal punishment help the sort of children who would call a teacher a bitch? I'm not sure, I'll have to think about it.
I remember quite clearly as a kid the disconnect when there was a delayed reaction, also seeing it clearly happen to my younger siblings. You get in trouble for something in the morning, and then the whole 'wait til your Dad gets home' would happen. Already got in trouble once, then I could have been having a good day otherwise which would get fucked up. All it did was make me resent my parents. I understand the "it's supposed to not feel good LOL" argument, but by a certain point I remember figuring that to my mind, delayed punishments were disproportionate and only served to make me feel miserable without any subconscious associations being made between the behaviour and the negative reinforcement. I didn't quite have the vocabulary to put it that way at that time (about 10), I just had to put up with it. It was never brutal, and those punishments dried up by my mid teens, but I basically developed a second personality that I'd use around my family, up until I was about 19. Whatever benefits it had to me, I feel they were far outweighed by the negatives. I guess some kids learn that way, and I'm not saying I'd absolutely never use corporal punishment myself, but I don't trust a teacher to administer such a punishment correctly one bit.
The ass is usually more fleshy, padded, aren't any central nervous stems around there, huge blood vessels or central organs. Hitting the legs and arms are more likely to break bones and what not.
Scootah can back me up on this if he wants, but a large, important part of BDSM is dominance/submission play. Imagine a dominant authority figure requiring a younger, apprehensive, submissive figure to bend over and receive spankings with a wooden paddle for a "transgression." The authority figure is in dress clothes and the submissive figure is in casual clothes. Prior to the spanking, there is a stern speech about consequences and respecting authority. Imagine that the authority figure is male and the submissive figure is female. Or reverse it, even. Imagine someone else nearby, watching closely as the punishment is administered. There are sexy Tumblrs dedicated to helping people masturbate to that scenario. It is extremely fucked up that this is happening to CHILDREN in a SCHOOL. I understand that there are parents out there who want their children to be spanked for transgressions that occur at school (I completely disagree with this disciplinary method, but let's treat it as a valid method of behavior control for this argument). Those parents need to take time off of work to drive to their child's school and spank their child themselves. If he/she is your kid and you feel like you have the authority to control the amount of physical pain he/she should feel during discipline, then you cannot outsource that authority to school officials. That is lazy, bad parenting.
There's actually a very interesting viewpoint put forth by Dan Savage that goes something along the lines of: "Of course we should have corporal punishment in schools. So many of my fetishes are linked back to things like being caned and the idea of that being transgressive and naughty. If we get rid of that, and various shaming behaviours, how will people enliven their erotic imaginations?" Food for thought. Or to have sex in, whichever.
I received corporal punishment in grade school a number of times, usually for being cheeky and disrespectful or for not doing homework. Getting hit with a cane on the ass was, for me, NOT pleasurable in ANY way. I wasn't wearing casual clothes though - just about every school here has some sort of uniform requirement, which I think would be a good thing for American schools (it makes for one less way for kids to mock other kids, anyway). However, by the time I got to high school, things had changed and it was no longer legally possible to enact corporal punishment on scholars. I basically lived in detention in high school and would much rather have had a few whacks than waste endless hours in detention (think at least 2 Fridays a month for basically the last 3 years of high school, not to mention some other days for other offenses - that's many hours) - although it wouldn't have made a difference to my outlook, it would've just saved my time and the teacher's time. Spoilered because it's my own outlook and possibly not applicable to many of you. Spoiler Detention is simply not a deterrent to some and those kids (like me, for example) will simply "buck the system" because the system sucks a fat dick. There is simply no effective punishment for those kids like me because they have had the experience of the teachers and other kids treating them like shit day after day and I always got singled out regardless, so why the fuck should I listen when the teachers are of no help anyway? I was one of those kids and no amount of corporal or other punishment would make me change because other people wouldn't change. mav_ian hit on the concept of "unfair punishment" - that is how it always felt to me.
So let me guess: when the doctor slapped your ass at birth, that just set your attiitude for life, didn't it?
I have this overwhelming urge to feed Durbanite some really good ecstasy and see if it changes his outlook on life. Yo Durbanite, I'm headed to South Africa in 2014, hit me up.
I was spanked when I was a kid by my parents. I find this a great idea. If the kid opts in for it, definitely. The argument that "The parent should come to work and do it." No, no, no. I'm looking at this from the perspective of getting spanked, I don't want the person who has to deal with shit from their boss, maybe take half a vacay day, have work pile up, have to drive through traffic, pay more money for gas, and throw off their entire day...to have a paddle in their hands. I rather let the person who is just coolly administering the punishment. Think about this in the court of law, let's say you bump into someone's car damaging it, do you want them administering the punishment? No way, they're going to go harder. "How dare!" Smack "You make me!" Smack "Leave work!" Smack "For this!" Smack! No, no, no. Also, you can't use the fact that someone masturbates to spanking as a reason not to make it a big deal. One word to combat that. Bronies. People masturbate to everything. Rule 47 right? So let's move on from that idea. Honestly growing up, spanking wasn't that bad, it lasted 2-3 minutes, maybe 5 at most. Left no bruisers, and the best part? I got back to my Sega and toys faster. My parents pulled a time-out on me, I was expecting the spanking, but that time-out made me feel like I was at Guantanomo Bay. Shit was brutal. They made me stand in the corner for 5 minutes, then sit for another 20. I was begging to be spanked. No I don't enjoy the action as a sexual practice now. And let me repeat this. I don't hate my parents, have a masters degree, live on my own, and make a good deal of money for a 26 year old. I've never smoked, eaten, or injected an illegal substance. I've never been arrested, and I don't even have a parking ticket in my name. People who haven't gotten spanked, act like spanking kids is going to turn them into the Joker from The Dark Knight. "THEY'RE JUST GOING TO WANT TO SEE THE WORLD BURN!" No my parents weren't lazy, they worked their asses off to send me to one of the top private schools in the country, The University of Chicago Lab Schools, and private college. The only thing I hate my parents for is never buying a dishwasher...assholes. I had to wash my own dishes, sometimes their dishes! Can you believe that? Fucking tyrants!
I love how both you and Durbanite took pains to inform me that getting disciplinary spankings as a child did not turn you into a sexual deviant who likes to be spanked in sexy situations as an adult. Thanks for sharing, but no one implied that. My major concern with forcing children to participate in this very sexualized form of "discipline" at school isn't that some random stranger on the Internet might think about their plight and jerk off to it. I can't help that. I also care very little about whether or not any child with budding BDSM tendencies (rare, but maybe possible?) gets a spanking and develops a fetish for it later in life, eventually masturbating to that scenario from their past. No, my point was this: This scenario (spanking+ dominance & submission) contains two incredibly common turn-ons for kinky adults. Like, scarily common. How much would you like to wager that the man or woman holding the paddle, about to swing at your child's upturned ass, doesn't have one or both of those turn-ons? As a person who was spanked as a child, I would never, ever hit my kids. But if I suffered a severe brain injury and reversed my position on this matter, I would certainly hope that I would never, ever put my children in a position to be live-action masturbation fodder in one of the most common BDSM roleplaying scenarios on the Internet because I was too lazy to hit my children myself. That is disgusting.
While I agree with your overall point, I think (hope) you might be reaching a bit here. You are assuming that the kinky adult involved can't differentiate between sexual roleplay with adults and a disciplinary action with children. Personally I like to have spas with women I'm fucking, but that's very different from sitting in the spa with my nephew.