Should School Officials Maybe Stop Beating Kids?
Did you know that in 20 hick states of our great union, it's still cool and A-OK for school officials to take your child into the dreaded "office" and administer stern thwacks to their bottom with some sort of wooden beating-stick, in order to teach them the difference between right and wrong (for example, violence is "wrong")? Yes, well. It is so. Might this be stupid?
Well, yes, it might. The NYT reports:
According to estimates by the federal Department of Education, 223,190 children were subject to corporal punishment in schools in the 2005-6 school year. That was nearly a 20 percent drop from data gathered a few years earlier
Beating two hundred thousand kids at the hands of school authorities in a single year won't have long-lasting psychological repercussions, right? Okay, cool.
It might be good to try paddling members of Congress, though.
