The county social worker arrives and finds that the injuries did not occur at home but were the result of a spanking administered earlier in the day by a teacher who had used a wooden paddle. The boy had misbehaved in a gym class. The social worker told the boy's father that if he had beaten his son, he would probably be in jail. The teacher's abuse is protected by law. You will find that corporal punishment of students is not an exclusive practice of the South or North or East or West.
Corporal punishment is legal in most places in thirty-nine states.
Louis and Chicago, for instance. Despite these advances, over half of American school children sit in classrooms where the paddle is a threat and where their psychological well-being is in harm's way. According to federal estimates, corporal punishment is resorted to in this nation some three million times a year. In the next forty-eight hours, you will mull over this tradition of school spanking as you have at other times in other places and as I have in years past. So often, defenders of corporal punishment in the schools will rationalize that they were beaten in the classrooms of their youth and ask others to just look at the good it did them.