Have you ever been spanked, beaten or otherwise abused ...

[Tender Branson]

Just read in the "Economist" that 19 US states still allow teachers to spank kids in school with a wooden tool.





Green = Corporal punishment prohibited in both schools and the home
Blue = Corporal punishment prohibited in schools only

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment

...

For me:

No (normal), but I remember that in middle-school a teacher once threw his bunch of keys pretty violently towards a student who talked with his seat neighbour, missing his head by only a few inches. Was a big issue back then.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Paddled, certainly.  It was (normal) for the time.

[Joe Republic]

[Modernity has failed us]

No (normal for today's kids)

Now I know which states not to teach in.

[ZuWo]

No, but in my first three years in elementary school I had an old teacher from Germany who would occasionally throw tennis balls at misbehaving students. He always missed on purpose, though.

[J-Mann]

No -- it was out of fashion by the time I went to school, although my brother and sister (10 and nine years older than me, respectively) remember kids being tossed around.

There's certainly a line of acceptable punishment which some teachers would cross, but to be honest, sometimes an asshole kid just flat-out needs his ass handed to him. Going from an era of corporal punishment to a consequence-free educational environment hasn't helped anything.

My dad went to school in the 1950s, and he remembered being in high school in a wood shop class and the teacher was talking about safety around the equipment. Some kid was goofing off, not paying attention and distracting others, so the teacher grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and the back of his pants and threw him into a stack of desks.

He had to go home because his pants ripped. Nothing was ever said again about the incident (likely, his parents thought it was justified) and the kid was well behaved from that point forward.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

My parents spanked me a few times... but in school?!  WTF is that [Inks]?  Is it still 1954? 

[memphis]

Just because the state allows it doesn't mean every district chooses to. The schools in Memphis haven't in years. Paddling students is a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's amazing there are districts willing to assume the legal liability.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Just because the state allows it doesn't mean every district chooses to. The schools in Memphis haven't in years. Paddling students is a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's amazing there are districts willing to assume the legal liability.

Meeting a lot of Southern kids in my Navy time; they seem to be quite proud that they were beat.  Teaches them "respect" and "manners".  Yea, because teaching through fear is super-constructive. 

[King]

I'm not from the South, no.

[Cassius]

My mother used to smack my bottom on the rare occasions that I was badly behaved; other than that, I've only ever been beaten up by fellow pupils at school. I remember two distinct period when I was often beaten up; at the age of 5, as I was a bit chubby, and when I switched schools because I was a precocious t*** who answered too many questions in class and was too formal. Needless to say, I learned from both experiences and changed my appearence and habits, enabling me to join in the beatings of the other outcasts. The circle of life and all that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I didn't grow up in Rochdale, so no.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

No.  Policy in my district at the time I was going to school was that paddling was an option, but the kids could veto it and get a different punishment instead.  I didn't get paddled at home (I might have gotten my butt swatted when I real young.) so I saw no need to get paddled at school.  I think maybe by the time I was in high school, the parents also had to give permission, but I managed to get thru high school without earning any demerits.

[afleitch]

I didn't grow up in Rochdale, so no.

Or Billericay, I would assume

(there's one for the sleuths out there)

[TNF]

I have not, but I do remember having to get parental approval or disapproval for corporal punishment as part of the normal first week paperwork every year. I can't recall anyone in any of the schools that I attended getting paddled. When I did my student teaching, my cooperating teacher told me that the last he had heard of anyone getting paddled in his district (which was about twenty minutes from my home) was in the 1980s. As memphis has noted, even though a state may technically allow it, as an administrator or a teacher you would have to be utterly insane to carry it out with the prospect of a lawsuit or losing your job hanging over your head.

[Adam Griffin]

It was long out of practice in my school system, but one county that's catty-corner to mine (Polk County, TN) still has it in their schools. It's also a county that is locally still quite competitive for Democrats. Who'd have thunk it?

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Never happened to me or anybody I knew, though my elementary and middle school teachers liked to remind the class that it was in their power to do so.

[Bacon King]

Just because the state allows it doesn't mean every district chooses to. The schools in Memphis haven't in years. Paddling students is a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's amazing there are districts willing to assume the legal liability.

When I was in elementary school, my school district had corporal punishment with a wooden paddle, but parents had to sign a waiver at the beginning of the school year if they wanted their kid to be paddled for misbehavior.

[morgieb]

No (didn't go to school in 1962)

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

No and corporal punishment is illegal in the Polish schools for really a long, long time.

I remember my mom telling me a story about her classmate in the elementary school who was slapped in the face by a teacher. The teacher was fired instantly.

[Adam Griffin]

So this has really inspired me to begin making a map, by digging through the CRDC data available from DoE. I've finished TN thus far; really amazing to see how prevalent it still is among the county systems. I was initially going to try to incorporate results for both county and city, but that will take far too long, so this is just a reflection of which county (and unified) school districts had instances of corporal punishment practiced between 2009-2011 (in red). In a good number of instances, the number of paddlings or whatever was in the single digits, but there are some counties in TN that are still absolutely beating the sh[inks] out of their kids; some counties with fewer than 20,000 people racked up anywhere from 300-500 instances of corporal punishment during the time period. I also noticed a few counties where apparently they are only paddling students with disabilities, and not students without disabilities (CRDC makes a distinction in their data).

[tik 🪀✨]

I got a good swatting when I was 7 at school, must have been before it was illegal.  I was also regularly belted at home - not badly, just spanked, slapped. I thought it was completely normal at the time.

[Bigby]

Yes, but they stop paddling once you reach 9th grade where I am from. I question the effectiveness of the punishment.

[Adam Griffin]

And Georgia, using the same aforementioned metrics. I had no idea how relatively common corporal punishment was in my area; apparently my county was a trailblazer on getting rid of it in the area.

[Bacon King]

TIL my county doesn't corporal punishment anymore

Adam which GA counties stand out for beating kids especially often?