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Trying to understand - some personal issues based on experience
The following was written for another forum, but nobody was really
able to give me any useful feedback. Someone suggested that I try here, and so I am. This wound up fairly long - I was just intending to write something fairly short about my experiences, but it kept growing. Having written it, I've decided to leave it in. The reason I've decided to post, to put my experiences down, because I personally find them rather hard to fit into the whole corporal punishment debate. I have discussed these in other forums before, but never here. My edperiences tell me that corporal punishment in schools at least (I know this is a parenting forum, but it was suggested to me as the best place I was likely to find to get intelligent answers to this) can be very positive. The problem for me is while I'm philosophically opposed to the idea of corporal punishment of children, and I've read many of the studies on it, I can't really reconcile that with my own experiences - and that troubles me to some extent. I'm going to outline a lot of stuff here, some of which probably isn't that relevant - but I'm trying to get my own head around these concepts as well. I came from a military family, which meant I attended four quite different schools in my first two and a half years of schooling. The first was a state primary school in the state of Victoria, Australia, the second was a very traditional Catholic primary school in New South Wales, the third was a more modern Catholic primary school in New South Wales, and the fourth was a similar modern Catholic school back in Victoria. Corporal punishment was permitted at all these schools, but the experience differed greatly - at the state primary school (which I only attended for about eight weeks anyway) I don't have memory of it being used - I do remember some discussion between my mother and some other parents about the fact that the principal at that school didn't like using it - but it's a very vague memory. At the very traditional Catholic primary school in Sydney, things were considerably different - we had an unusually large class - 41 children - and the teacher in charge relied very heavily on the threat of corporal punishment to keep us under control. She used to hit a table with a ruler to get us to be quiet, with the implied threat that she could hit us instead. We were always told that very naughty children could get the feather duster - which had a short cane handle and sat on the window ledge, and I do remember being quite scared of that idea. But I cannot remember any actual incident of corporal punishment in the, I think, about 8 months I was at that school. I don't know for certain that it didn't happen and I don't remember - but I'm inclined to think it didn't happen. I remember enough of what happened to think I would remember if it was actually used. The next school - which I attended for a year and six weeks or so - was a more modern Catholic primary school. Her e there was the threat of the cane, but it wasn't a major feature of life in the school. We just knew it existed - it wasn't ever seriously threatened. And again I have no recollection of it being used. Then we moved back to Victoria, and, again, I attended a local Catholic primary school. This school was the first one I spent any significant time at - I started there two months after the start of grade two, and remained there until the end of grade six. Soon after I started there - sometime when I was in Grade Two, there was a 'bark fight' one lunchtime. We had bark covering our entire playground, because it was softer to fall onto than the ground - and people were throwing it at each other. A significant number of the kids who were throwing it were made to go to the office - and that afternoon, they were given the strap. We all knew this had happened. A couple of boys from my own class were on the receiving end and I remember them coming back into the class, still crying. I remember the incident vividly. I got bullied a *lot* at school. I had been a favourite target from the day I started school. At the state school I attended first, uniforms were optional - and I was the few boys who wore one - that made me a target. When we moved - well, at the next three schools I was the perpetual new boy. The bullying wasn't that bad to begin with - but it was always there. In Grade Four, one of my classmates was picking on me - I think because I had a picture of superman on my library bag - our class teacher overheard it, and called us both into the classroom. He asked me what had happened - and when I told him, he grabbed my classmate by the arm and smacked him across his backside twice, hard. I was quite shocked - the strapping incident two years previously was the only example of corporal punishment I knew of at the school. I was bullied almost every day - what this boy did this day, was no different than happened to me three or four times a week. Really - he hardly ever bullied me - some boys did it constantly - he was just the unlucky one who got caught, one of the rare times he did it. I don't really think I had any really strong feelings about what happened at that point, beyond initial shock. And I can't remember if it stopped him doing it again or not. At the start of Grade 5, I was kicking a soccer ball around before school - and the *worst* bully I knew at the school came up to me to try and take the ball away. This person picked on me absolutely constantly at every opportunity - I think mostly out of jealousy. I was the best student in the class, he was the worst. This day - well, he just took my ball. For some reason, at this moment, all the bullying I'd had for years built up and something snapped within me. I knocked him down - and when I had him on the ground I started kicking him, over and over and over again. In the body, in the head. I really, really wanted to hurt him. I'd never felt that way before in my life - I just stood there and let people hit me normally - in fact, with this kid, the previous year when I'd been left in charge of the class during a wet lunchtime (I was the teacher's pet, I guess) and part of my job was to write down names of kids who were misbehaving, placing a tick next to them if they did it again - well, I wrote his name down for something - and someone told him. He came over and hit me across the back of the head. I added a tick. He hit me again. I added a tick. He hit me again. I added a tick - and I just kept going. I never fought back. Ever. Except this one time - when I really lost control. After I'd kicked him quite a few times - I have no idea how many - I suddenly realised what I was doing - and I stopped, terrified at the idea I might have seriously hurt him. He jumped to his feet - and began chasing me. I ran to the nearest teacher - who was coming across the playground because she'd seen me kicking him. We both wound up having to see our deputy principal - the man who handed out official punishments. And he took out the strap and showed it to me and told me how much it hurt, and how he wouldn't use it this time - but if I ever kicked someone again, he would. And to the bully - well, it basically became clear that he had got the strap before - and he wasn't getting it this time, only because I'd already hurt him. This teacher scared the living daylights out of me - he made me so scared of the strap I decided that I didn't want to ever get it. I'm not sure it really had a positive effect on my behaviour at that point - because 99% of the time, I was very well behaved, and that last 1% - well, I was beyond thinking of consequences - but if I had been inclined to be poorly behaved, I wouldn't be surprised if it would have deterred me. The above is my entire primary school experience of corporal punishment, as far as I can recall. And it's really only listed for background to what comes next in case it has some relevance - I'm not sure if it does or not. I finished primary school at the end of grade six, and along with, probably 90% of my classmates, moved on at the start of Year 7 to the local Catholic secondary college. This is where most kids from my school and about half a dozen other Catholic primary schools in the region wound up. It was almost automatic, and it was my parents plan I'd stay there until the end of my schooling. They didn't put a great deal of thought into it - beyond wanting me to get a Catholic education, they assumed all the local schools were probably much the same. We were working class - the local schools were all that really got considered. Now, this school was quite large - about 1200 students evenly spaced across the six years of secondary school - 200 in each year. The junior school - one end of the main campus - was virtually a separate school - Year 7 and Year 8. About a quarter of the kids in Year 7 had been at the same primary school as me, so I knew a lot of kids - and unfortunately they knew me. Now, at some stage over the previous year - when I was in grade five or grade six, the Catholic Eduation Office had announced that all schools in the Catholic system in the archdiocese of Melbourne should stop using corporal punishment. Now, I don't know that that made a huge difference to my experiences at this school - this school believed in what they called 'non-punitive positive discipline', no use of punishment of any sort except as an absolute last resort - this idea was so ingrained that I'm sure it must have predated the CEO's decision and so presumably that decision wasn't relevant at this school. Please let me make something clear - I've no fundamental problem with the idea of non-punitive discipline, or positive discipline. If it can be made to work, wonderful. But this school didn't make it work - I don't even think they really tried. I probably cannot be more critical of this school in this regard - but that criticism is directed at the *specific* practices at this school, not to the general concepts that they used, misused, or misappropriated the names of. Basically, I'm inclined to the view that this school had basically no discipline, whatever it called its policies. Kids were allowed to do just about anything they wanted outside of the classroom (and often inside it as well). Unfortunately, a sizeable proportion of the boys (mostly) decided what they wanted to do was bully someone else. And somehow - because of the fact that about a quarter of the kids knew me - news got around that I was the *perfect* target. I didn't fight back (well, except that one time - but the only guy who knew about that besides me hadn't moved onto this school). I was a nerd who liked to read rather than play football and cricket (actually I would have happily played football and cricket if I'd thought I could have done so safelt). Anyway - they started picking on me. Constantly, three days a week (two days a week, the library was open to boys at lunchtime - girls could use it Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays - boys on Tuesday and Thursday). It started out just as verbal teasing - but it quickly became physical. I was held down and almost drowned in puddles. I was stabbed with compasses. It started to happen in class as well, as it became clearer and clearer that the school's policies wouldn't protect me. I had a class teacher - a home room teacher - who was also my teacher for three subjects. She really bought into all the school ideas - I'm sure a lot of teachers just went along with them because it was where they worked - she *believed* in all of them. She was the person I should have been able to go to for help. But we had personality conflicts as well - because one of her other ideas was that all children had inherently equal levels of ability - and I didn't fit neatly into that idea. I found the classwork in school absurdly easy - it didn't fit into her ideas at all. Anyway, I couldn't go to her for help - and if I had, she wouldn't have done anything anyway. When winter came, things got far, far worse. They were building something - a sports centre, I think - which took up a great deal of the playing area. Much of the rest of the playgrounds couldn't be used in wet weather. So if it rained - or if it had rained in the previous day - we found ourselves at lunchtime confined to a very small area of the playground which was concreted and undercover - 200 of us crammed into an area that was close to standing room only. I couldn't hide from anyone. I had to stand there and take whatever people threw at me - sometimes literally. I was beaten. I was burned. I was crushed. My glasses were stolen. My clothes were ruined. Teachers even saw it happen, sometimes - and did nothing. They couldn't punish anyone. And they didn't seem to have any other tactics. I used to spend my entire day in terror, and my lunctimes in pain. When I used to get home at the end of the day - well, I wasn't in the mood to do anything associated with school. I just wanted to turn school off in my mind - have nothing to do with it. I stopped doing my homework. I stopped doing anything to do with school. And because of what was happening to me everyday - and because the teachers even when they knew about it did nothing, I started to feel like there was something wrong with me. I mean - the teachers weren't stopping people from hurting me, so obviously those people weren't doing anything wrong. I must have deserved what was happening. So I wasn't going to tell my parents what was going on. And, back at school - well, things just kept getting worse. They didn't punish kids for not doing their homework - the idea was that your marks would suffer as a natural consequence - but my marks were still very high, so that did nothing. The teachers either didn't want to rock the boat - or didn't see anything particularly wrong with what was happening. Then one day, a boy in an electric wheelchair - one of the worst bullies I knew at that time - surrounded by his cronies - trapped me in corner in a hallway. He was using his chair to crush me into that corner. And he was seriously hurting me - I was in serious fear for my life, the pressure was getting so great. In desperation, I reached out and grabbed his hair, and I pulled his head back - I was trying to injure him, I hadn't lost control this time - I was using pretty much the minimum force I could to save myself - and a teacher saw. From where he was - he must have been able to see everything. And came charging down the hall, and separated us and took me to a classroom. And there he read me the riot act and accused me of bullying. It was completely unjustified - I was the victim of constant bullying that this teacher *knew* about - he had seen it happen. And he'd seen this incident, and so knew I'd been defending myself. But - well, I found out then that the only kids considered worthy of being protected at that school were those with obvious physical disabilities - and it probably helped that his mother was a Cabinet Minister. (Just for the record - I now think this boy bullied me simply because he was an even more obvious target than me - he joined the bullying in a big way, to protect himself. Four years later, we met again in an environment where neither of us had to fear bullies - and he was a completely different person.) I was given a note to take home telling my parents I'd been caught bullying a disabled boy. Fortunately - well, perhap unfortunately really, because it might have exposed what was happening to my parents earlier - I was able to forge my father's signature on the reply slip. After this incident I was suicidally depressed. I spent a huge amount of time fantasising about ways of killing myself. I don't know why I didn't do it. I really was deeply, deeply, depressed and could only see it getting worse. Matters finally came to a head a little over halfway through the year. I went to the toilets during classtime, and was attacked by a couple of older students - they shouldn't have even been down at our end of the school. I don't know why they attacked me - today I wonder if I'd walked in on a drug deal, but the idea never occurred to me then. They beat me senseless and left me unconscious on the toilet floors. After a while, my teacher wondered why I was taking so long - and in an incredible example of her thinking skills sent a girl to find me - she knew I'd gone to the toilets, and she a girl looking for me. I'm glad she did - but it baffles me. This girl came and found me - and she ran to a phone and called for an ambulance, before heading to the office. The ambulance service hearing a report of a child beaten in a school toilet contacted the police. I was taken to hospital - fortunately not seriously injured, but my parents were, of course, informed. My father had left the navy by this time, after twenty years service - he'd come out a very senior NCO. He was the type of man who expected to get answers - so the following day, he went to the school to find out what they could tell him. He managed to get past all their attempts to hide what was going on and had been going on - he got an accurate idea of what had been happening. The senior school counsellor was actually very helpful - I wish she'd been available to me. She suggested my parents take me to a psychologist - they asked who she recommended and she told them the name of the man who was supposedly the best in the state - so my parents took me to see him. He confirmed my depression - he also IQ tested me, and gave me a whole range of other tests - I turned out to be 'profoundly gifted' - something he said that school couldn't handle, and probably the major reason why I was such a target - I couldn't relate easily to other kids, and in an environment where I was constantly terrified of being beaten up by them, I wasn't going to learn. He told my parents the names of three schools where he recommended they should try and send me - all exclusive, expensive, private schools. I had to go back to the school I was already at, until the end of the year. It was really unavoidable - it was September by the time all the testing had been done, and the Australian school year coincides with the calendar year. If I was withdrawn from school, the likelihood of the three schools suggested taking me would have gone way down - and the local high school which was the only short term alternative, was regarded as the third-worst school in the state. I was able to survive my remaining time at this school, only because of the hope I'd get out of there. It wasn't easy - the school's "solution" to my constant bullying - given that they didn't think they could punish the bullies (who 'needed help') was to give me lunctime detention for the rest of the year, so I'd be safe. But I was *deeply* clinically depressed - and genuinely suicidal. I fully intended at this point to kill myself rather than come back to that school the following year. I developed a stutter, I found myself completely unable to trust most people. I was quite seriously harmed by my year at this school under it's regime of "non-punitive discipline" and "positive discipline." And, hearing such terms still make me shudder, unfortunately. Anyway - to continue. My parents, with the help of the psychologist, managed to get me offered places at two of the three schools he suggested. One was quite close to where I lived - one was a considerable distance away. They chose the latter for three reasons - firstly, that it was Catholic (the other was Church of England) and while that had ceased to be their priority in choosing a school, they still saw it as a positive if it was possible. Secondly, that it was the psychologist's top recommendation - it was the one he felt was best, the other two had been suggested simply because they were closer to home. The third - was that for the first year, I'd be able to attend the school's prep school that was much closer to my home, and was much smaller - and had a reputation for having a very nurturing environment, which they felt I needed after the year I'd just experienced. They were seriously worried about my psychological wellbeing. So at the start of year eight - about a week after my thirteenth birthday, I began at the preparatory school to one of the state's most expensive private schools. It was a major financial sacrifice for my parents to send me there - but they were willing to do what was needed. This school was considerably different to the one I'd just come from. It was much smaller - about 250 boys across four years (Grade 5-Year 8). Whereas the other school had been proud to be "modern", this one was very big on "tradition". And, significantly here, in terms of their disciplinary policies. This school had no problem with the idea of positive disciplinary methods as part of what they did - but, at the same time, they had no problems with the idea of punishment when necessary - including corporal punishment. It was considered a serious sanction for fairly severe misbehaviour - but it was most definitely available, and was used fairly often. Now, this school did not have a major bullying problem, but it wasn't totally immune from it. And unfortunately for me, I was, once again, something of a target. For a start, I was the new boy - and it was very rare for a boy to enter the school in year 8. So I stood out. Secondly, about two weeks before school started I'd attended a summer camp run by the Archdiocese for Catholic boys from schools all over the city - and in response to the normal question kids ask of each other - "What school do you go to?" - I'd revealed that I was coming to this new school - there were a couple of the boys at the camp who came from my new school, and on the last night of the camp, we had a trivia competition - where, fed up with the fact that my team hadn't won a single sporting event all week, I decided to show off my extensive general knowledge and blew the opposition out of the water. Somehow a rumour got started at my new school that the reason I was coming into the school was because I was some sort of genius who'd won a scholarship - and that I was that I was poor - both of which had some truth, behind them, but weren't really true - my IQ had influenced the school's decision to take me, but there was no scholarship, and while my family wasn't poor - my father earned a decent wage - we certainly had nothing like the money these boys were used to. It really didn't matter to most of the boys at the school - but there were a few boys who were inclined to bully, and this gave them some ammunition. The psychologist - I was still seeing him weekly - had told me that this school was a place where it was safe for me to allow my intellectual and academic abilities to show, unlike my previous school - so I did. And that made things slightly more difficult. He'd also told me that most bullies would give up if they didn't get a reaction, so I did my best not to react. I tried to ignore them. I didn't report them because that would have been a reaction. They were tenacious though - they didn't give up just because I denied them a reaction most of the time. But compared to what had happened the previous year, these boys were nothing to really worry about. If I hadn't already been carrying so much emotional baggage, they wouldn't have worried me at all - as it was, they were a mild annoyance, a constant reminder of what could happen - I was worried, mostly about escalation. Corporal punishment at this school was an ever-present fact of life. It was constantly being threatened, and in fairly regular use - but it didn't really worry me that much. I've tried to work out why - I think it was a combination of a number of factors - the first was that it was understood that you really did have to earn it - it wasn't like you were going to get it by accident - for something you didn't mean to do. That applied to everyone - and nobody seemed to worry that much about getting hit, unless it seemed likely it was an imminent event. For me, there was also, perhaps, the added factor that my previous year in a hellish environment where there was no real discipline and no real punishment might have made me more amenable to the idea that the existence of any form of punishment was a positive thing. Now - intellectually I was still having no problems with my schoolwork - however, at this school, homework counted for a lot - and over the previous year, I'd completely lost any self-discipline I had when it came to doing my homework, for the reasons I described earlier. I had always been lazy when it came to schoolwork - I found it so easy that I never developed decent work habits. The previous year had just made the problem worse. Actually it hadn't really been a problem up until now - but it was definitely going to be in the future, given the way our education system worked here (university entrance determined by sustained performance on homework assignments in your final year of school). When I didn't do my homework - to start with I got away with mild reprimands - then more severe ones. It moved onto lunchtime detentions, and then afterschool detentions. They tried other things as well - talking to me to try and explain why it was important, negotiating with me about what I had to do, etc - but I don't remember all of those things that well. Neither approach seemed to be working. They took things pretty slowly - I suspect, because all my teachers knew a lot about my previous year, they were very reluctant to treat me too harshly. They stretched out every stage to breaking point - when they normally would have taken action in days, they gave me weeks. That's a guess on my part - but it seems likely. And the fact that I was getting away with things (relatively speaking) that other boys weren't, started to become obvious. The bullies - three of them - made it clear to me that they intended to get me strapped. I wasn't incredibly worried by that threat - frankly, because I couldn't see how they could do it, and it wasn't something that really worried me that much anyway, in comparison to what I'd already been through. They started pulling little tricks to get me into trouble - stealing my homework - putting an apple in my desk just before we had a desk inspection (food was not allowed in desks). Minor harassment like that. Then, finally, the week after our PE teacher had threatened to strap anyone who forgot their PE uniform, they removed and hid my shinpads - needed for hockey. I knew what had happened - but decided to play without them. They spent the entire period hacking away at my shins at every opportunity - it hurt a bit, but not that much. After PE, we had to shower - a big communal shower - strip off, get in, get the mud off and get out. It wasn't closely supervised. They jumped me in the shower - they knocked me down. I thought the worst thing they could to me was kick me - so I curled up into a ball to protect myself. They didn't kick me. They urinated on me. It didn't hurt me physically - but emotionally, it sent me into a huge spin. Everything that had happened to me - that I was slowly recovering from - started to flood back. I couldn't believe what was happening - it was absolutely awful. Somebody went and got the teacher - which indicates how seriously the other boys viewed this - one thing you never did was tell on someone else - but this went completely beyond the pale. He pulled them out and I remember him screaming at them to get dressed, and telling a couple of our more trustworthy classmates to get me dressed and to the sickbay. They did as they were told - and I was in incredible emotional distress. I couldn't believe what these people had done to me. This school had become my haven - and they completely violated me in one of the worst ways I could imagine. I was suicidal again - frankly, I was homicidal - I would have happily seen them dead. It was a hideous feeling, and I hate writing about it, or thinking about it. But I got to see them strapped for what they did. They were belted and I got to see it happen - and that is what calmed me down, more than anything else. I don't think I really needed to see it - just knowing it had happened, probably would have been enough. But the fact that that happened made it clear to me that this school, and these teachers, considered me worthy of their protection. My need to be safe from unwarranted, uncontrolled abuse was important and they'd take steps to make it happen. But at that stage, I needed to know unambiguously that what they'd done was not considered acceptable in any way - and I don't think anything else could have made this clear to me. These boys never bullied me again. And that is when I really started to recover - to the point that I wouldn't fall back. I think that very possibly saved my life - because I had four and a half years more of school to go through, and some bullying was inevitable, and until that moment there was always a risk that any incident could have retriggered everything that had come before. This is when I got to the stage that I wouldn't... overreact to a single incident again. I wasn't out of the woods - systematic abuse similar to what I'd had the previous year could have taken me back - but a single incident, no matter how bad - and there were a couple more in later years - didn't. And, personally, my teacher's indulgence eventually did run out. I have vivid memories of walking behind my form master down the stairs from our classroom to the office, my heart pounding, my mouth dry, after I'd told him I couldn't do a detention for not having done my maths homework on Thursday night, because I already had one for not having done my Latin homework. What happened next hurt a lot more than I had expected. But it was all over in less than five minutes from the time he discovered my transgression. It happened once more before I got the message that they were serious about this, and it would keep happening. It hurt, I certainly did not enjoy it - but it didn't too me any long term harm that I can detect. In fact, it did me a lot of good - I started out doing my homework just to avoid the strap - and after only a few weeks I was so used to doing it, that it didn't phase me anymore - by the following year, when I was in quite a different disciplinary environment (at our senior school, corporal punishment existed in theory, but was incredibly rarely used, and certainly not for homework violations) it had become a habit, and I was well on the way to developing greater self-discipline in most areas of my life. So this year - a year when I most faced corporal punishment at school and I actually received it - well, frankly, it was the happiest year of my entire childhood, and, by far, the happiest of all my years at school. The presence of corporal punishment only played a small role in that - but it was a real and important role. The year when the focus was "positive discipline" and "non-punitive disipline" almost killed me, and left me a clinical depression. The year when corporal punishment was just an accepted part of life saved me - and left me able to function and actually be happy again (it took another decade to completely shake off depressive episodes - this wasn't a miracle cure - but it gave me part of the start). Now, maybe the first year, the ideas were used unusually badly and perverted away from how things should have been. And maybe the second year, everything was used unusually well - I don't know, really. All I know is what my experiences tell me. I apologise for the length of this post - I actually expected it to be fairly short when I started writing it - but frankly, the above paragraph, while an honest assessment of my feelings, disturbs me more than a bit - because as I say, philosophically, I don't like the idea of corporal punishment. I hate the idea of children being hurt by adults. And I've read the research - not all of it, but a lot of it, and I know what it says. And I'd like to give those things more credence. But... well, to do so, seems to mean denying my own experiences, and as a matter of honesty, I can't easily do that. Over the years since I finished school, I've wondered why my reaction and experience might not fit in too well with conventional opinion. I've considered all sorts of possible reasons - my IQ level, for example - simply because it's unusual enough to mean anomalies could sometimes occur. My background - while unusual at my school, no different from a lot of other people. I even considered for a long time the idea that there was a sexual element involved, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've looked to try and find reasons why my experiences don't seem to mesh with the conventional thought on this issue, and I can't figure it out. The above aren't the only reasons I've considered, by any means - I just mention them as an indication I have looked to try and explain this. Why does it matter? Well, two reasons, really. The first is that at the start of last year, I began my studies to become a teacher. Now it's very unlikely I'll ever be a teacher in a school where corporal punishment is used - there's so few left here, and they're not the type I am at all likely to work in - but my views on this do impact my views on other forms of punishment and other methods of discipline as well. It's still over two years before I'll be in a classroom regularly so I have plenty of time to think about this. The second reason - in the first half of next year, a book is being published in the United States, which I wrote a chapter of, outlining some details of my school experiences. For various reasons, my school experiences are considered of interest and valuable to others - people are going to read them, and maybe base teaching practice on them (at least that's part of the purpose of the book). Now, I didn't mention my punishment experiences in that chapter - they weren't particularly relevant - but it's been mentioned to me that I may be asked to help spruik the book here in Australia (as I'm one of the few people who wrote a chapter from here - it's mostly a US book) and that means I could be asked questions about my schooling and before I am I want to try and work about what I believe about other aspects of it. So I'm trying to work out what is going on here. If anyone has any ideas - please pipe up. |
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Trying to understand - some personal issues based on experience
Stuart,
You state that you have read many of the studies on corporal punishment. Can you provide references to the studies you have read? This may be a starting point for discussion. I will be on vacation for the next two weeks and so will not be able to respond. However, I think it would be helpful to know which studies you have read. LaVonne Stuart Magpie wrote: The following was written for another forum, but nobody was really able to give me any useful feedback. Someone suggested that I try here, and so I am. This wound up fairly long - I was just intending to write something fairly short about my experiences, but it kept growing. Having written it, I've decided to leave it in. The reason I've decided to post, to put my experiences down, because I personally find them rather hard to fit into the whole corporal punishment debate. I have discussed these in other forums before, but never here. My edperiences tell me that corporal punishment in schools at least (I know this is a parenting forum, but it was suggested to me as the best place I was likely to find to get intelligent answers to this) can be very positive. The problem for me is while I'm philosophically opposed to the idea of corporal punishment of children, and I've read many of the studies on it, I can't really reconcile that with my own experiences - and that troubles me to some extent. I'm going to outline a lot of stuff here, some of which probably isn't that relevant - but I'm trying to get my own head around these concepts as well. I came from a military family, which meant I attended four quite different schools in my first two and a half years of schooling. The first was a state primary school in the state of Victoria, Australia, the second was a very traditional Catholic primary school in New South Wales, the third was a more modern Catholic primary school in New South Wales, and the fourth was a similar modern Catholic school back in Victoria. Corporal punishment was permitted at all these schools, but the experience differed greatly - at the state primary school (which I only attended for about eight weeks anyway) I don't have memory of it being used - I do remember some discussion between my mother and some other parents about the fact that the principal at that school didn't like using it - but it's a very vague memory. At the very traditional Catholic primary school in Sydney, things were considerably different - we had an unusually large class - 41 children - and the teacher in charge relied very heavily on the threat of corporal punishment to keep us under control. She used to hit a table with a ruler to get us to be quiet, with the implied threat that she could hit us instead. We were always told that very naughty children could get the feather duster - which had a short cane handle and sat on the window ledge, and I do remember being quite scared of that idea. But I cannot remember any actual incident of corporal punishment in the, I think, about 8 months I was at that school. I don't know for certain that it didn't happen and I don't remember - but I'm inclined to think it didn't happen. I remember enough of what happened to think I would remember if it was actually used. The next school - which I attended for a year and six weeks or so - was a more modern Catholic primary school. Her e there was the threat of the cane, but it wasn't a major feature of life in the school. We just knew it existed - it wasn't ever seriously threatened. And again I have no recollection of it being used. Then we moved back to Victoria, and, again, I attended a local Catholic primary school. This school was the first one I spent any significant time at - I started there two months after the start of grade two, and remained there until the end of grade six. Soon after I started there - sometime when I was in Grade Two, there was a 'bark fight' one lunchtime. We had bark covering our entire playground, because it was softer to fall onto than the ground - and people were throwing it at each other. A significant number of the kids who were throwing it were made to go to the office - and that afternoon, they were given the strap. We all knew this had happened. A couple of boys from my own class were on the receiving end and I remember them coming back into the class, still crying. I remember the incident vividly. I got bullied a *lot* at school. I had been a favourite target from the day I started school. At the state school I attended first, uniforms were optional - and I was the few boys who wore one - that made me a target. When we moved - well, at the next three schools I was the perpetual new boy. The bullying wasn't that bad to begin with - but it was always there. In Grade Four, one of my classmates was picking on me - I think because I had a picture of superman on my library bag - our class teacher overheard it, and called us both into the classroom. He asked me what had happened - and when I told him, he grabbed my classmate by the arm and smacked him across his backside twice, hard. I was quite shocked - the strapping incident two years previously was the only example of corporal punishment I knew of at the school. I was bullied almost every day - what this boy did this day, was no different than happened to me three or four times a week. Really - he hardly ever bullied me - some boys did it constantly - he was just the unlucky one who got caught, one of the rare times he did it. I don't really think I had any really strong feelings about what happened at that point, beyond initial shock. And I can't remember if it stopped him doing it again or not. At the start of Grade 5, I was kicking a soccer ball around before school - and the *worst* bully I knew at the school came up to me to try and take the ball away. This person picked on me absolutely constantly at every opportunity - I think mostly out of jealousy. I was the best student in the class, he was the worst. This day - well, he just took my ball. For some reason, at this moment, all the bullying I'd had for years built up and something snapped within me. I knocked him down - and when I had him on the ground I started kicking him, over and over and over again. In the body, in the head. I really, really wanted to hurt him. I'd never felt that way before in my life - I just stood there and let people hit me normally - in fact, with this kid, the previous year when I'd been left in charge of the class during a wet lunchtime (I was the teacher's pet, I guess) and part of my job was to write down names of kids who were misbehaving, placing a tick next to them if they did it again - well, I wrote his name down for something - and someone told him. He came over and hit me across the back of the head. I added a tick. He hit me again. I added a tick. He hit me again. I added a tick - and I just kept going. I never fought back. Ever. Except this one time - when I really lost control. After I'd kicked him quite a few times - I have no idea how many - I suddenly realised what I was doing - and I stopped, terrified at the idea I might have seriously hurt him. He jumped to his feet - and began chasing me. I ran to the nearest teacher - who was coming across the playground because she'd seen me kicking him. We both wound up having to see our deputy principal - the man who handed out official punishments. And he took out the strap and showed it to me and told me how much it hurt, and how he wouldn't use it this time - but if I ever kicked someone again, he would. And to the bully - well, it basically became clear that he had got the strap before - and he wasn't getting it this time, only because I'd already hurt him. This teacher scared the living daylights out of me - he made me so scared of the strap I decided that I didn't want to ever get it. I'm not sure it really had a positive effect on my behaviour at that point - because 99% of the time, I was very well behaved, and that last 1% - well, I was beyond thinking of consequences - but if I had been inclined to be poorly behaved, I wouldn't be surprised if it would have deterred me. The above is my entire primary school experience of corporal punishment, as far as I can recall. And it's really only listed for background to what comes next in case it has some relevance - I'm not sure if it does or not. I finished primary school at the end of grade six, and along with, probably 90% of my classmates, moved on at the start of Year 7 to the local Catholic secondary college. This is where most kids from my school and about half a dozen other Catholic primary schools in the region wound up. It was almost automatic, and it was my parents plan I'd stay there until the end of my schooling. They didn't put a great deal of thought into it - beyond wanting me to get a Catholic education, they assumed all the local schools were probably much the same. We were working class - the local schools were all that really got considered. Now, this school was quite large - about 1200 students evenly spaced across the six years of secondary school - 200 in each year. The junior school - one end of the main campus - was virtually a separate school - Year 7 and Year 8. About a quarter of the kids in Year 7 had been at the same primary school as me, so I knew a lot of kids - and unfortunately they knew me. Now, at some stage over the previous year - when I was in grade five or grade six, the Catholic Eduation Office had announced that all schools in the Catholic system in the archdiocese of Melbourne should stop using corporal punishment. Now, I don't know that that made a huge difference to my experiences at this school - this school believed in what they called 'non-punitive positive discipline', no use of punishment of any sort except as an absolute last resort - this idea was so ingrained that I'm sure it must have predated the CEO's decision and so presumably that decision wasn't relevant at this school. Please let me make something clear - I've no fundamental problem with the idea of non-punitive discipline, or positive discipline. If it can be made to work, wonderful. But this school didn't make it work - I don't even think they really tried. I probably cannot be more critical of this school in this regard - but that criticism is directed at the *specific* practices at this school, not to the general concepts that they used, misused, or misappropriated the names of. Basically, I'm inclined to the view that this school had basically no discipline, whatever it called its policies. Kids were allowed to do just about anything they wanted outside of the classroom (and often inside it as well). Unfortunately, a sizeable proportion of the boys (mostly) decided what they wanted to do was bully someone else. And somehow - because of the fact that about a quarter of the kids knew me - news got around that I was the *perfect* target. I didn't fight back (well, except that one time - but the only guy who knew about that besides me hadn't moved onto this school). I was a nerd who liked to read rather than play football and cricket (actually I would have happily played football and cricket if I'd thought I could have done so safelt). Anyway - they started picking on me. Constantly, three days a week (two days a week, the library was open to boys at lunchtime - girls could use it Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays - boys on Tuesday and Thursday). It started out just as verbal teasing - but it quickly became physical. I was held down and almost drowned in puddles. I was stabbed with compasses. It started to happen in class as well, as it became clearer and clearer that the school's policies wouldn't protect me. I had a class teacher - a home room teacher - who was also my teacher for three subjects. She really bought into all the school ideas - I'm sure a lot of teachers just went along with them because it was where they worked - she *believed* in all of them. She was the person I should have been able to go to for help. But we had personality conflicts as well - because one of her other ideas was that all children had inherently equal levels of ability - and I didn't fit neatly into that idea. I found the classwork in school absurdly easy - it didn't fit into her ideas at all. Anyway, I couldn't go to her for help - and if I had, she wouldn't have done anything anyway. When winter came, things got far, far worse. They were building something - a sports centre, I think - which took up a great deal of the playing area. Much of the rest of the playgrounds couldn't be used in wet weather. So if it rained - or if it had rained in the previous day - we found ourselves at lunchtime confined to a very small area of the playground which was concreted and undercover - 200 of us crammed into an area that was close to standing room only. I couldn't hide from anyone. I had to stand there and take whatever people threw at me - sometimes literally. I was beaten. I was burned. I was crushed. My glasses were stolen. My clothes were ruined. Teachers even saw it happen, sometimes - and did nothing. They couldn't punish anyone. And they didn't seem to have any other tactics. I used to spend my entire day in terror, and my lunctimes in pain. When I used to get home at the end of the day - well, I wasn't in the mood to do anything associated with school. I just wanted to turn school off in my mind - have nothing to do with it. I stopped doing my homework. I stopped doing anything to do with school. And because of what was happening to me everyday - and because the teachers even when they knew about it did nothing, I started to feel like there was something wrong with me. I mean - the teachers weren't stopping people from hurting me, so obviously those people weren't doing anything wrong. I must have deserved what was happening. So I wasn't going to tell my parents what was going on. And, back at school - well, things just kept getting worse. They didn't punish kids for not doing their homework - the idea was that your marks would suffer as a natural consequence - but my marks were still very high, so that did nothing. The teachers either didn't want to rock the boat - or didn't see anything particularly wrong with what was happening. Then one day, a boy in an electric wheelchair - one of the worst bullies I knew at that time - surrounded by his cronies - trapped me in corner in a hallway. He was using his chair to crush me into that corner. And he was seriously hurting me - I was in serious fear for my life, the pressure was getting so great. In desperation, I reached out and grabbed his hair, and I pulled his head back - I was trying to injure him, I hadn't lost control this time - I was using pretty much the minimum force I could to save myself - and a teacher saw. From where he was - he must have been able to see everything. And came charging down the hall, and separated us and took me to a classroom. And there he read me the riot act and accused me of bullying. It was completely unjustified - I was the victim of constant bullying that this teacher *knew* about - he had seen it happen. And he'd seen this incident, and so knew I'd been defending myself. But - well, I found out then that the only kids considered worthy of being protected at that school were those with obvious physical disabilities - and it probably helped that his mother was a Cabinet Minister. (Just for the record - I now think this boy bullied me simply because he was an even more obvious target than me - he joined the bullying in a big way, to protect himself. Four years later, we met again in an environment where neither of us had to fear bullies - and he was a completely different person.) I was given a note to take home telling my parents I'd been caught bullying a disabled boy. Fortunately - well, perhap unfortunately really, because it might have exposed what was happening to my parents earlier - I was able to forge my father's signature on the reply slip. After this incident I was suicidally depressed. I spent a huge amount of time fantasising about ways of killing myself. I don't know why I didn't do it. I really was deeply, deeply, depressed and could only see it getting worse. Matters finally came to a head a little over halfway through the year. I went to the toilets during classtime, and was attacked by a couple of older students - they shouldn't have even been down at our end of the school. I don't know why they attacked me - today I wonder if I'd walked in on a drug deal, but the idea never occurred to me then. They beat me senseless and left me unconscious on the toilet floors. After a while, my teacher wondered why I was taking so long - and in an incredible example of her thinking skills sent a girl to find me - she knew I'd gone to the toilets, and she a girl looking for me. I'm glad she did - but it baffles me. This girl came and found me - and she ran to a phone and called for an ambulance, before heading to the office. The ambulance service hearing a report of a child beaten in a school toilet contacted the police. I was taken to hospital - fortunately not seriously injured, but my parents were, of course, informed. My father had left the navy by this time, after twenty years service - he'd come out a very senior NCO. He was the type of man who expected to get answers - so the following day, he went to the school to find out what they could tell him. He managed to get past all their attempts to hide what was going on and had been going on - he got an accurate idea of what had been happening. The senior school counsellor was actually very helpful - I wish she'd been available to me. She suggested my parents take me to a psychologist - they asked who she recommended and she told them the name of the man who was supposedly the best in the state - so my parents took me to see him. He confirmed my depression - he also IQ tested me, and gave me a whole range of other tests - I turned out to be 'profoundly gifted' - something he said that school couldn't handle, and probably the major reason why I was such a target - I couldn't relate easily to other kids, and in an environment where I was constantly terrified of being beaten up by them, I wasn't going to learn. He told my parents the names of three schools where he recommended they should try and send me - all exclusive, expensive, private schools. I had to go back to the school I was already at, until the end of the year. It was really unavoidable - it was September by the time all the testing had been done, and the Australian school year coincides with the calendar year. If I was withdrawn from school, the likelihood of the three schools suggested taking me would have gone way down - and the local high school which was the only short term alternative, was regarded as the third-worst school in the state. I was able to survive my remaining time at this school, only because of the hope I'd get out of there. It wasn't easy - the school's "solution" to my constant bullying - given that they didn't think they could punish the bullies (who 'needed help') was to give me lunctime detention for the rest of the year, so I'd be safe. But I was *deeply* clinically depressed - and genuinely suicidal. I fully intended at this point to kill myself rather than come back to that school the following year. I developed a stutter, I found myself completely unable to trust most people. I was quite seriously harmed by my year at this school under it's regime of "non-punitive discipline" and "positive discipline." And, hearing such terms still make me shudder, unfortunately. Anyway - to continue. My parents, with the help of the psychologist, managed to get me offered places at two of the three schools he suggested. One was quite close to where I lived - one was a considerable distance away. They chose the latter for three reasons - firstly, that it was Catholic (the other was Church of England) and while that had ceased to be their priority in choosing a school, they still saw it as a positive if it was possible. Secondly, that it was the psychologist's top recommendation - it was the one he felt was best, the other two had been suggested simply because they were closer to home. The third - was that for the first year, I'd be able to attend the school's prep school that was much closer to my home, and was much smaller - and had a reputation for having a very nurturing environment, which they felt I needed after the year I'd just experienced. They were seriously worried about my psychological wellbeing. So at the start of year eight - about a week after my thirteenth birthday, I began at the preparatory school to one of the state's most expensive private schools. It was a major financial sacrifice for my parents to send me there - but they were willing to do what was needed. This school was considerably different to the one I'd just come from. It was much smaller - about 250 boys across four years (Grade 5-Year 8). Whereas the other school had been proud to be "modern", this one was very big on "tradition". And, significantly here, in terms of their disciplinary policies. This school had no problem with the idea of positive disciplinary methods as part of what they did - but, at the same time, they had no problems with the idea of punishment when necessary - including corporal punishment. It was considered a serious sanction for fairly severe misbehaviour - but it was most definitely available, and was used fairly often. Now, this school did not have a major bullying problem, but it wasn't totally immune from it. And unfortunately for me, I was, once again, something of a target. For a start, I was the new boy - and it was very rare for a boy to enter the school in year 8. So I stood out. Secondly, about two weeks before school started I'd attended a summer camp run by the Archdiocese for Catholic boys from schools all over the city - and in response to the normal question kids ask of each other - "What school do you go to?" - I'd revealed that I was coming to this new school - there were a couple of the boys at the camp who came from my new school, and on the last night of the camp, we had a trivia competition - where, fed up with the fact that my team hadn't won a single sporting event all week, I decided to show off my extensive general knowledge and blew the opposition out of the water. Somehow a rumour got started at my new school that the reason I was coming into the school was because I was some sort of genius who'd won a scholarship - and that I was that I was poor - both of which had some truth, behind them, but weren't really true - my IQ had influenced the school's decision to take me, but there was no scholarship, and while my family wasn't poor - my father earned a decent wage - we certainly had nothing like the money these boys were used to. It really didn't matter to most of the boys at the school - but there were a few boys who were inclined to bully, and this gave them some ammunition. The psychologist - I was still seeing him weekly - had told me that this school was a place where it was safe for me to allow my intellectual and academic abilities to show, unlike my previous school - so I did. And that made things slightly more difficult. He'd also told me that most bullies would give up if they didn't get a reaction, so I did my best not to react. I tried to ignore them. I didn't report them because that would have been a reaction. They were tenacious though - they didn't give up just because I denied them a reaction most of the time. But compared to what had happened the previous year, these boys were nothing to really worry about. If I hadn't already been carrying so much emotional baggage, they wouldn't have worried me at all - as it was, they were a mild annoyance, a constant reminder of what could happen - I was worried, mostly about escalation. Corporal punishment at this school was an ever-present fact of life. It was constantly being threatened, and in fairly regular use - but it didn't really worry me that much. I've tried to work out why - I think it was a combination of a number of factors - the first was that it was understood that you really did have to earn it - it wasn't like you were going to get it by accident - for something you didn't mean to do. That applied to everyone - and nobody seemed to worry that much about getting hit, unless it seemed likely it was an imminent event. For me, there was also, perhaps, the added factor that my previous year in a hellish environment where there was no real discipline and no real punishment might have made me more amenable to the idea that the existence of any form of punishment was a positive thing. Now - intellectually I was still having no problems with my schoolwork - however, at this school, homework counted for a lot - and over the previous year, I'd completely lost any self-discipline I had when it came to doing my homework, for the reasons I described earlier. I had always been lazy when it came to schoolwork - I found it so easy that I never developed decent work habits. The previous year had just made the problem worse. Actually it hadn't really been a problem up until now - but it was definitely going to be in the future, given the way our education system worked here (university entrance determined by sustained performance on homework assignments in your final year of school). When I didn't do my homework - to start with I got away with mild reprimands - then more severe ones. It moved onto lunchtime detentions, and then afterschool detentions. They tried other things as well - talking to me to try and explain why it was important, negotiating with me about what I had to do, etc - but I don't remember all of those things that well. Neither approach seemed to be working. They took things pretty slowly - I suspect, because all my teachers knew a lot about my previous year, they were very reluctant to treat me too harshly. They stretched out every stage to breaking point - when they normally would have taken action in days, they gave me weeks. That's a guess on my part - but it seems likely. And the fact that I was getting away with things (relatively speaking) that other boys weren't, started to become obvious. The bullies - three of them - made it clear to me that they intended to get me strapped. I wasn't incredibly worried by that threat - frankly, because I couldn't see how they could do it, and it wasn't something that really worried me that much anyway, in comparison to what I'd already been through. They started pulling little tricks to get me into trouble - stealing my homework - putting an apple in my desk just before we had a desk inspection (food was not allowed in desks). Minor harassment like that. Then, finally, the week after our PE teacher had threatened to strap anyone who forgot their PE uniform, they removed and hid my shinpads - needed for hockey. I knew what had happened - but decided to play without them. They spent the entire period hacking away at my shins at every opportunity - it hurt a bit, but not that much. After PE, we had to shower - a big communal shower - strip off, get in, get the mud off and get out. It wasn't closely supervised. They jumped me in the shower - they knocked me down. I thought the worst thing they could to me was kick me - so I curled up into a ball to protect myself. They didn't kick me. They urinated on me. It didn't hurt me physically - but emotionally, it sent me into a huge spin. Everything that had happened to me - that I was slowly recovering from - started to flood back. I couldn't believe what was happening - it was absolutely awful. Somebody went and got the teacher - which indicates how seriously the other boys viewed this - one thing you never did was tell on someone else - but this went completely beyond the pale. He pulled them out and I remember him screaming at them to get dressed, and telling a couple of our more trustworthy classmates to get me dressed and to the sickbay. They did as they were told - and I was in incredible emotional distress. I couldn't believe what these people had done to me. This school had become my haven - and they completely violated me in one of the worst ways I could imagine. I was suicidal again - frankly, I was homicidal - I would have happily seen them dead. It was a hideous feeling, and I hate writing about it, or thinking about it. But I got to see them strapped for what they did. They were belted and I got to see it happen - and that is what calmed me down, more than anything else. I don't think I really needed to see it - just knowing it had happened, probably would have been enough. But the fact that that happened made it clear to me that this school, and these teachers, considered me worthy of their protection. My need to be safe from unwarranted, uncontrolled abuse was important and they'd take steps to make it happen. But at that stage, I needed to know unambiguously that what they'd done was not considered acceptable in any way - and I don't think anything else could have made this clear to me. These boys never bullied me again. And that is when I really started to recover - to the point that I wouldn't fall back. I think that very possibly saved my life - because I had four and a half years more of school to go through, and some bullying was inevitable, and until that moment there was always a risk that any incident could have retriggered everything that had come before. This is when I got to the stage that I wouldn't... overreact to a single incident again. I wasn't out of the woods - systematic abuse similar to what I'd had the previous year could have taken me back - but a single incident, no matter how bad - and there were a couple more in later years - didn't. And, personally, my teacher's indulgence eventually did run out. I have vivid memories of walking behind my form master down the stairs from our classroom to the office, my heart pounding, my mouth dry, after I'd told him I couldn't do a detention for not having done my maths homework on Thursday night, because I already had one for not having done my Latin homework. What happened next hurt a lot more than I had expected. But it was all over in less than five minutes from the time he discovered my transgression. It happened once more before I got the message that they were serious about this, and it would keep happening. It hurt, I certainly did not enjoy it - but it didn't too me any long term harm that I can detect. In fact, it did me a lot of good - I started out doing my homework just to avoid the strap - and after only a few weeks I was so used to doing it, that it didn't phase me anymore - by the following year, when I was in quite a different disciplinary environment (at our senior school, corporal punishment existed in theory, but was incredibly rarely used, and certainly not for homework violations) it had become a habit, and I was well on the way to developing greater self-discipline in most areas of my life. So this year - a year when I most faced corporal punishment at school and I actually received it - well, frankly, it was the happiest year of my entire childhood, and, by far, the happiest of all my years at school. The presence of corporal punishment only played a small role in that - but it was a real and important role. The year when the focus was "positive discipline" and "non-punitive disipline" almost killed me, and left me a clinical depression. The year when corporal punishment was just an accepted part of life saved me - and left me able to function and actually be happy again (it took another decade to completely shake off depressive episodes - this wasn't a miracle cure - but it gave me part of the start). Now, maybe the first year, the ideas were used unusually badly and perverted away from how things should have been. And maybe the second year, everything was used unusually well - I don't know, really. All I know is what my experiences tell me. I apologise for the length of this post - I actually expected it to be fairly short when I started writing it - but frankly, the above paragraph, while an honest assessment of my feelings, disturbs me more than a bit - because as I say, philosophically, I don't like the idea of corporal punishment. I hate the idea of children being hurt by adults. And I've read the research - not all of it, but a lot of it, and I know what it says. And I'd like to give those things more credence. But... well, to do so, seems to mean denying my own experiences, and as a matter of honesty, I can't easily do that. Over the years since I finished school, I've wondered why my reaction and experience might not fit in too well with conventional opinion. I've considered all sorts of possible reasons - my IQ level, for example - simply because it's unusual enough to mean anomalies could sometimes occur. My background - while unusual at my school, no different from a lot of other people. I even considered for a long time the idea that there was a sexual element involved, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've looked to try and find reasons why my experiences don't seem to mesh with the conventional thought on this issue, and I can't figure it out. The above aren't the only reasons I've considered, by any means - I just mention them as an indication I have looked to try and explain this. Why does it matter? Well, two reasons, really. The first is that at the start of last year, I began my studies to become a teacher. Now it's very unlikely I'll ever be a teacher in a school where corporal punishment is used - there's so few left here, and they're not the type I am at all likely to work in - but my views on this do impact my views on other forms of punishment and other methods of discipline as well. It's still over two years before I'll be in a classroom regularly so I have plenty of time to think about this. The second reason - in the first half of next year, a book is being published in the United States, which I wrote a chapter of, outlining some details of my school experiences. For various reasons, my school experiences are considered of interest and valuable to others - people are going to read them, and maybe base teaching practice on them (at least that's part of the purpose of the book). Now, I didn't mention my punishment experiences in that chapter - they weren't particularly relevant - but it's been mentioned to me that I may be asked to help spruik the book here in Australia (as I'm one of the few people who wrote a chapter from here - it's mostly a US book) and that means I could be asked questions about my schooling and before I am I want to try and work about what I believe about other aspects of it. So I'm trying to work out what is going on here. If anyone has any ideas - please pipe up. |
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Trying to understand - some personal issues based on experience
On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Carlson LaVonne wrote: Stuart, You state that you have read many of the studies on corporal punishment. Can you provide references to the studies you have read? This may be a starting point for discussion. I will be on vacation for the next two weeks and so will not be able to respond. However, I think it would be helpful to know which studies you have read. LaVonne We can always start with Power & Chapiesky (1986). ;-) Doan |
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Trying to understand - some personal issues based on experience
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Trying to understand - some personal issues based on experience
Carlson LaVonne wrote in message ...
Stuart, You state that you have read many of the studies on corporal punishment. Can you provide references to the studies you have read? This may be a starting point for discussion. I will be on vacation for the next two weeks and so will not be able to respond. However, I think it would be helpful to know which studies you have read. That's actually harder to answer than I thought it would be - the problem is, I've been doing this for a while, and it's hard to remember everything I've read - doing my education course, I'm at a university with a large education specific library, so it's not hard to get most things I've seen referenced. Most recently, it's been McMillan, Boyle, Wong, Duku, Fleming and Walsh - "Slapping and spanking in childhood and its association with lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders in a general population sample." I've read quite a bit of Straus' work. I think I'll have to go through all my photocopies of articles I've made to see what I've got - but they are in storage as I'm currently moving furniture around. |
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