The practice generally involves forcefully striking a student's buttocks with a flat wooden board. This is done as punishment for some infraction, or perceived infraction, of school rules. The intention is to instill fear in the school population and thus to bring about general compliance with school rules. As for the individual recipient, the experience of being corporally punished usually involves terror in anticipation of impact, pain upon impact, soreness, bruising or contusions following impact, and an indeterminate, but likely deleterious, psychological outcome. These consequences vary from case to case and range from slight to serious.
Effects are impossible to predict before the fact and difficult to assess after the fact.
But the great dangers inherent in corporal punishment are obvious and unarguable. It is our concern about those dangers that has prompted this letter. We are writing to a number of your counterparts in other teacher training institutions in paddling states and asking them the same questions as above. We intend to share responses to this query with our membership and may publish them, or an analysis of them, on our Web site. Thank you for your kind participation.