to wonder about "Bring Back the Cane!!!" debate

[Mitmoo]

It's on R5L this morning apparantly almost 50% of parents and a lot of kids have said they think the cane should return to school. I'm not sure who they asked but surely if you're hitting kids with implements you've already lost the plot?

Dawn, i agree, my dd1 often comes across as being cocky or rude, she has Aspergers and doesn't always understand what is being asked of her and can't tell if people are joking or being serious. Some teachers may see this as her being naughty. No child should be scared .

I wouldn't allow DS to go to any institution where anyone was likely to get beaten with a stick, whether he was at risk or not. I wouldn't want him to have any part ion such a system and know that people he knew were being legally beaten.

And although he is as good as gold, terrified of getting into trouble, he has twice in Primary been punished when OTHER people were talking on his table. So the 'if they behave they won't get caned' argument is tosh. Surely everyone has seen KES!

Also, for what it's worth, I have plenty of contact with the true trouble makers in schools, the disaffected, and the catastrophically badly parented. The cause of their behaviour is not an inadequate range of punishments available to teachers. They quite often already include kids who have experienced violence at home since babyhood, and if in a gang face people with knives. To scare them with a cane in school you would need to be talking of a GBH level flogging.

Are individual teachers REALLY prepared to hit a child with a stick? I wouldn't if I were a teacher!

Seems a funny sort of message to me-'I am bigger and stronger and I can hit you to get my own way!'
As someone said, when I was at school the same DCs got caned, so it didn't actually do much!!
The DCs who would get caned generally have problems of some sort-much better to work out the problem with the parent.
I am not teaching any more but as a teacher I wouldn't be prepared to hit a child-or even send them off to be hit by someone else.
This is the 21st century-you like to think that we have made some progress in the care of DCs!
Who is having this debate? I can't see many teacher prepared to carry it out.

Has anyone a link to the actual survey? I can't google atm.

A local boys school still had the cane when I was in sixth form (early 1990s). Only the school almost never used it simply because the boys would prefer to get caned quickly and then have punishment over with, as opposed to giving them long detention and writing loads of lines, or making them get up early and run round the pitches twenty times before school started.

I have to admit I don't understand why some schools seem so ineffective and claim they can't give children detention, when others use it to great effect (my BIL makes kids sandpaper grafitti off the desks during detention, which seems to work quite well and is actually useful - he wasn't allowed to get them to clean the toilets though!)

Almost certainly the '50%' who were for it are the same '50%' who would also bring back hanging ( and flogging and all the other stuff) I have a hard time with kids in class but I would NEVER think that corporal punishment would work . A lot of problems stem from their home lives and often this is what is happening at home - doing it at school too would guarantee they would end up screwed up and a nuisance to society not to mention I don't think they would come to school again either.

I started primary school way back in 1969, secondary in 1975 and, even then, the cane was a thing of the past. Any legislation was just catching up. So whoever it was on R5L saying 'bring it back' would have to be in their sixties or seventies to have actually experienced it in action. Most who did experience it wouldn't be saying 'bring it back'. And 'kids' would definitely would have no idea either way.

What nonsense, my children have Asperger Syndrome, my son (16) was asked recently what he'd done his homework on. His answer was 'Paper'. Should the teacher have been caned for asking the wrong question? Or should ds have been punished for being rude? He wasn't, he was answering the question, as he saw, it correctly. However, in a school situation where the cane is used, that could be perceived as 'being naughty'.

That doesn't really make sense because an answer like that could be perceived as being naughty no matter what punishments are used

Extract from Sky - looks like the Government aren't considering it thank goodness.

"But the Department for Education has completely ruled out a return to corporal punishment in schools.

In a statement it said: "There is no intention of ever reintroducing corporal punishment
"Parents are right to demand that their children learn in a safe and ordered environment - that's why we are toughening up teachers' disciplinary powers and restoring their authority."

Amanda Brown, spokesperson for the National Union of Teachers called the idea Victorian.

"Rather than going back to the old days, and of course corporal punishment is outlawed, we'd like to see much more positive behaviour," she said.

"This research shows that there's a real consensus within the school community that what everybody wants is a calm ordered environment that pupils can learn in and teachers can teach in."

No teachers I know would be prepared to hit a child with a stick. That's not why you join the profession.

I don;t think bringing back CP is the way to go, but we absolutely MUST do something about the damage done by the kids who are disrupting teaching and harming their own education and that of their classmates.

Don't know how best to handle it. Whether sending the bad apples off to get their education in a different place would be a the answer I don't know. I know my DS1 and his classmates would be a lot further on if ONE particular kid in his class wasn't there. The thing is that this kid is super bright. I think he's bored, but his parents don;t speak great English and I think they really understand how bad his filthy language is and don;t seem to be doing anything much about his behaviour. We met him in the park once and I was gobsmakced at his Mum totally ignoring his attempts to vandalise a park bench, while he was F**ing and Blinding. He's an 8yo by the way, and we live in a very well to do market town in the home counties, not a deprievd inner city area.

I think the current system is too 'one size fits all'. I think the answer is going to involve a huge increase in funding for education, which would allow special help for the kids that need it. i.e the clever disruptive ones, the SEN ones, the ones with emotional problems, family problems, useless parents, superbright and underchallenged....what ever it is.
Generally smaller classes, more teachers, more resources targetted wherever it is needed.

Worraliberty,
Of course it could be seen as naughty no matter what punishments are used. So could anything. My point was that it is relatively trivial, but the cane still could be used, were we using it.

Certainly at my school, run by penguins on roller skates, it was used for the relatively minor.

R5Live is hardly known for its high brow debate!