George Ayoub: Hardwood paddle changed nothing for young wiseacre

If only I could have held on to the teacher's desk for 26 years.

Nebraska did away with corporal punishment in 1988, forcing educators to discipline students without smacking them around. Today, Nebraska is one of 29 states that forbid spanking or paddling.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, teachers walloped more than 220,000 students in 2006-07. That's down from the previous year when more than 340,000 kiddoes grabbed their ankles and hoped for the best.

None of which helped me in the fall of 1962, when, bent over my seventh-grade "block" teacher's desk in the emptiness of after school, I took a paddle shot to the keister that echoed down the hallway of Walnut Junior High School.

Block was English and social studies, nearly two hours a day for my smart mouth to take me to the place where a paddling was appropriate, at least in the eyes of adults, those delivering the payload and those nodding in assent -- teachers and parents.

My block teacher was famous for his paddle, about two feet of nondescript hardwood that he would occasionally pick up during class lest we forget that he could and would beat us if he had to.

Some of the boys in my class wore an after-school paddling like a badge of honor. All I wore was a serious red mark on my fanny for a few days and a well-founded fear the rest of the school year.

Oh, and 46 years later … I still crack wise.



Creep factor

Even though educators pasted nearly a quarter million students in 2006-07, many teachers from states that have done away with corporal punishment bemoan the passing of the paddle. They insist that a trusty piece of ash or an open hand delivers the right message at the right time for the right reasons.

It is efficient, too. No need to write up a detention slip, hire another disciplinarian or call the parents for a conference. Just have the little miscreants grab their ankles, swing for the fences and we're done here.

The mystique of a paddling can be effective, too, with stories of bleeding and bruising and terrible rubber hoses often as bad as the actual shellacking.

Plus, for me, the creep factor was at work. My parents had spanked me, but this was a stranger in a coat and tie with marginal breath, a guy who handed out state capital quizzes and spelling tests by day but wielded a homemade weapon after the last bell.

The problem with waxing sentimental about a corporal punishment is that some of its numbers don't add up. The research on its value is murky at best, too.

The Center for Effective Discipline has done its homework on the efficacy of the paddle, however.

In answering charges that education suffers from a lack of corporal punishment, it points out that school shootings happen more in states that have corporal punishment; that a correlation exists between a decline in paddling and a decline in violence toward teachers; that graduation rates and ACT scores are higher in states without paddling; that eight of the top 10 paddling states are also in the top 10 states with the highest percentage of incarceration.



Same neighborhood

Yes, you are right. Other factors such as poverty and parenting impact each of those categories. Drawing individual direct lines from corporal punishment can be a problem. Spanking Junior may work on Tuesday, but not so for Sissy on Friday.

Nevertheless, the center's numbers do fly in the face of some myths.

I wonder, too, about a school teaching its students that violence is not a solution to life's problems, but spanking a 6-year-old for being poky back from recess.

That said, ask any experienced teacher and he or she will tell you that the classroom isn't what it used to be. Disciplining can be difficult.

I'm probably no worse for the paddling I took in block class (or the one in gym a few months later or the spanking my kindergarten teacher gave me for a cloakroom misdemeanor).

I'm absolutely sure I'm no better, either.



George Ayoub is senior writer at The Independent.