Who Would Jesus Whip?

MoneychangersA story caught my eye on Catholic News Agency, according to which:

Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans said that a local Catholic school must permanently ban corporal punishment for student misbehavior, even though many parents and alumni support the practice. …

Since 1951 teachers and administrators at the historically black all-boys school have used an 18-inch-long wooden paddle, known as “the board of education,” to administer punishment to students for tardiness, sloppy dress or other minor infractions.

However, Archbishop Aymond and Josephite superior general Fr. Edward Chiffriller, who heads the school’s board of trustees, ordered an end to the practice.

A town hall meeting assembled to discuss the change attracted an audience that numbered over 600 and included current students from grades six to 12, current and former parents, grandparents, benefactors and friends of the school.

“Board of education.” Heh. Definite points for that.

Personally, I do not have an opinion on whether corporal punishment should be administered at St. Augustine High School—the school in question. My own conviction is that the issue of corporal punishment is one for parents to decide. I have known some parents who have successfully raised children using it seldom or never. I also know there are parents who feel it is has played an important and needed role in raising their children. The fact is that children are different, and some respond to different things. To one child a time out may be far more agonizing (and motivating) than a paddling. To others just the reverse will be the case. Whether corporal punishment is to be used in the case of their own children—and how much and when—is something that I view as within the natural law rights of the parents.

Because of that, I can see why a school might choose not to have corporal punishment on campus, simply in respect of the rights of parents who do not wish it administered to their children (quite apart from issues of lawsuits and such). I can also see a school having a policy of allowing corporal punishment for those children whose parents do not object to it (such a policy could be a little tricky, but doable). And I can see a school saying, “It is our policy to use corporal punishment in disciplinary cases. If you have a problem with that policy, feel free to place your children with another school that has a different policy.”

So, I don’t have a problem with schools taking different policy positions on this, just as I don’t have a problem with parents doing so. I think reasonable people can have a legitimate diversity of opinion.

I also don’t have a problem with Archbishop Aymond deciding not to have corporal punishment at St. Augustine. As the local bishop, that’s within his purview.

I would, however, offer some thoughts on some of the claims made in the CNA story. I have to say that I wasn’t at the town hall meeting, and so I don’t know exactly what was said or in what context, but based on the coverage provided by CNA, several things leapt out at me:

Corporal punishment can cause unintended physical injury and studies indicate it can cause physical, emotional and psychological damage, including loss of self-esteem and increased hostility toward authority, the archbishop said.

I couldn’t blame the parents at the town hall meeting who may have questioned this kind of claim. While scientific studies can tell us many useful things, something like a third of them turn out to be wrong, and they can often be skewed by the agendas of the scientists who perform them. There have been all kinds of social science and psychological studies that have been “cooked” to support claims like abortion doesn’t leave lasting emotional damage, divorce doesn’t really hurt the children, homosexual couples are just as capable of being good parents, etc., etc. The anti-corporal-punishment movement intersects in a significant way with the same constellation of agendas that has cooked the studies just named. It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that anti-spanking studies have been similarly cooked.

That’s not to say that they’re automatically wrong. They could be right. This is an empirical question, and the solution cannot be decided in advance. If reliable studies have been or are in the future conducted that show a net detriment to moderate spanking—for all children in all American cultures and subcultures—then that’s an important finding that needs to be taken into account. But there is reason for caution here.

I’d be rather doubtful that such studies would find this as I, like many, was the recipient of moderate spanking as a child. I was even paddled in junior high school by one of the teacher/coaches, and I don’t perceive it to have done lasting damage to me. I suspect the experience of many—including many of the pro-paddling parents at St. Augustine’s—is similar.

Along related lines:

The archbishop explained that he believes that “hitting a young man does not build character.”

Phrased in those terms, the claim has the ring of plausibility. Hitting people is not generally recognized as a way to build character. But one could suggest that this is prejudicial language, because we are not talking about hitting, stripped of all context. There is a difference between giving someone a swat when they’ve behaved badly and to motivate them to be have better and just randomly hitting a person for no reason.

Further, this argument might prove too much. All forms of childhood discipline involve causing some kind of pain in order to motivate the child not to behave badly in the future. Spanking uses physical pain. Time outs, grounding, docking an allowance, deprivation of TV or Internet privileges, and adding chores use another form of pain. But couldn’t one just as easily say, “Inflicting pain on a young man does not build character”?—or even more provocatively, “Torturing a young man does not build character”? Despite their surface plausibility as phrased, we can recognize them as using prejudicial language. And surely we cannot infer from such claims that all forms of childhood discipline are wrong.

But if that’s the case, what makes the use of moderate physical pain different from the others? Why is it disallowed while the others aren’t? It doesn’t seem intrinsically worse than the others. I know I’d much rather have a couple of swats than, say, be grounded for a month, or even a week. A lot of children, I imagine, would feel the same way. So it doesn’t seem that corporal punishment is intrinsically cruel compared to other forms of punishment.

In any event, sacred Scripture takes a positive attitude toward childhood discipline, for the author of Hebrew writes:

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it [Heb. 12:11].

The author of Hebrews doesn’t specify that he’s talking about physical discipline, though he surely wasn’t excluding it. There simply was no anti-spanking ethic in ancient Hebrew culture. Indeed, Proverbs counsels:

He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him [Prov. 13:24].

That’s not to say that we must use these methods today, but it does show that they are not foreign to the Judeo-Christian tradition, including in the New Testament period in which the author of Hebrews was writing. And even if the author of Hebrews (very implausibly) didn’t have corporal punishment in mind, he clearly acknowledged the use of painful discipline to train towards proper conduct.

Archbishop Aymond also reported that he had received a letter from an activist who wrote from Ireland, which is suffering an abuse scandal. The writer singled out the continued corporal punishment at St. Augustine.

This apparently met with significant opposition from local parents:

A statement published at the school website reported that the community “overwhelmingly supports” the punishment. Attendees at the town hall expressed “outrage” that “persons from a different culture,” such as the activist from Ireland, were discussing St. Augustine’s policy and were “attempting to undermine” the school without significant input from those affected.

“Many expressed outrage that African American parents have to haggle with non-African Americans about how to raise their own sons,” the statement said.

I can’t blame the parents for feeling this way. I am sure that the archbishop meant to cite the Irish activist’s letter in a positive way, perhaps as an illustration of how the Church need to go the extra mile to prove it is not abusing children, in light of the current abuse scandals.

But I can easily see how local parents would be outraged at the idea of a foreign activist, a person of a different culture, getting the local bishop’s ear and then he announces a policy change without the input of the people most involved and affected. If I were a parent at the school, my natural response would be one of outrage. (Though I hope I’d be open to an alternative presentation of the facts if it could be shown that something else happened.)

Though I think I see what the bishop may have been getting at by citing the letter from the Irish activist, I am puzzled by something else he said:

“I do not believe the teachings of the Catholic Church, as we interpret them today in 2011, can possibly condone corporal punishment,” he explained to a Feb. 24 a town hall meeting at the Josephite-run St. Augustine High School in New Orleans. While parents have the authority to administer such punishment, he could not “possibly condone” the school doing so, the archdiocesan newspaper the Clarion Herald reports.

One of the sources of my confusion is the statement that “parents have the authority to administer such punishment” (the Clarion Herald adds, “in their homes to discipline their children”) followed by the claim that the bishop could not “possibly condone” the school doing so (“especially in a Catholic school,” the Clarion Herald adds).

Huh?

If a parents have the authority to do something in their own home for the benefit of their children then why can’t the delegate the authority to do the exact same thing to teachers? Isn’t that the whole principle on which non-home schools operate? Parents have a natural law right to train their offspring (including the right to discipline them—childhood discipline is part of the overall education of a child, regardless of whether it’s corporal punishment or something else) and then they delegate that function or some of those functions to the teachers and officials at schools where they enroll their children.

So I don’t get that.

Perhaps the archbishop meant that they have the authority to do this in their own homes in the sense of “I think what you’re doing is wrong, but I can’t stop you in your own homes,” but then why point this out to them? Wouldn’t saying that they have the authority to do this in their homes and leaving it at that undermine his message that this is wrong and give permission to parents to do something in their homes that he views as wrong?

So I remain puzzled by this.

I am even more puzzled by the statement that “I do not believe the teachings of the Catholic Church, as we interpret them today in 2011, can possibly condone corporal punishment.” Really? I must confess that I don’t know what the archbishop is thinking of here.

I am unaware of any statement in the Catechism, the Compendium of Social Doctrine, any papal encyclical, any curial document, or any other magisterial document whatsoever that says corporal punishment cannot be used as a method of childhood discipline.

A search of the Vatican web site turns up only a handful of references to corporal punishment, and only one of them appears to deal with the use of corporal punishment with children. That one reference is in a remark made in passing by a participant in a panel discussion on democracy hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the proceedings of which are expressly flagged as “although published by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, only represent the points of view of the participants and not those of the Academy.”

Of course, as a member of the magisterium, the archbishop could invoke his own teaching authority on the matter, in which case his own subjects would have to wrestle with the question showing the deference due to the local bishop’s individual teaching authority, but the archbishop appears not to have done this.

He did not say, “By virtue of my teaching authority as a successor of the apostles and as the shepherd of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, I declare my judgment that corporal punishment of children is wrong.” Instead, he appealed more generally to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” He further enhanced the communal appeal by referring to how “we” interpret them today.

I am unaware of any doctrinal development that has occurred on the part of the Church’s magisterium as expressed in its official documents concerning this point, so I am simply at a loss.

I can also imagine counter-questions that might be posed, such as, “If the Church acknowledges that physical force can be used to achieve the end of self-defense or the defense of others, why can’t moderate use of physical force be used to keep children away from dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations (e.g., swatting a four-year old on the rear to train him not to run out into a traffic-filled street)?” or “If other forms of painful discipline can be used to properly train a child, why can’t moderate physical discomfort be used if that is what this particular child responds to?”

Finally, there is this statement by the archbishop:

“My image of Jesus is that he said, ‘Let the children come to me.’ I cannot imagine Jesus paddling anyone.”

I can imagine parents having several responses to this statement.

First, although I am sure that the bishop didn’t intend it to come across this way, there is always a danger when using an “I can’t imagine Jesus doing X” argument that it will come across as playing a kind of trump card with the intention of shutting off further discussion. If it is said that Jesus wouldn’t do something, that strongly implies that we shouldn’t either. We shouldn’t even talk about doing something Jesus wouldn’t do, right?

Further, because the person making the argument puts himself on the side of Jesus and—by implication—implicitly suggests that those on the other side of the discussion are not with Jesus, it can unintentionally convey a holier-than-thou impression, as well as being a discussion stopper.

I’m sure the archbishop had no intention of conveying such impressions, but it would be human for parents at St. Augustine’s to take such impressions away from the discussion.

There is another reason I am generally uncomfortable with arguments of this form, which is that they are not very reliable.

Jesus is most certainly a crucial point of reference for us morally. He is the all-holy, infinitely holy Son of God incarnate. But not every moral dilemma can be settled by simply asking, “What Would Jesus Do?”

For one thing, Jesus as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind had a very different mission than our own personal vocations. His situation was quite different than ours. He had a different mission, different responsibilities, different resources, and different rights. He also lived in a different century and a different culture. This facts create major asymmetries between his situation and ours, making any straightforward application of WWJD problematic.

Further, we tend to read what Jesus would do in terms of our own preferences and aspirations. There is a famous saying in biblical circles (a saying quoted by Pope Benedict in the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth), which is this: “By Their Lives of Christ Ye Shall Know Them.”

This is a reference to the fact that biblical scholars have a tendency to write biographies of Jesus (Lives of Christ) in which the portrait of Jesus that they end up painting just coincidentally happens to reflect their own personal ideology. If you want to know what a particular scholar’s personal ideology is, read his Life of Christ and see what portrait of Jesus he paints. This happens over and over again in biblical studies—so much so that it has become proverbial.

The same thing happens outside the scholarly community, in the ordinary world of pew-sitting believers. “I don’t think Jesus would do that!” has been used by many pious moralizers to object to all kinds of activity that is perfectly legitimate.

“I don’t think Jesus would watch television/go to a movie/attend a sporting event/read a secular book/etc. when he could be praying or reading the Bible.”

The ultimate end of that line of reasoning is Jansenism or scrupulosity—o r both.

Reading our own personal pious intuitions into what Jesus would do is simply not reliable. Jesus shocked the people of his own day by eating with prostitutes, sinners, and tax collectors. He could well shock us by watching TV, going to a movie, attending a sporting event, or reading a secular book. We just don’t know what he’d do in those situations.

Jesus is much less like our pious intuitions and much more like C. S. Lewis’s depiction of Aslan, who refused to be predictable or be boxed in by promises to behave in a predictable and harmless way. Like Aslan, you know that what Jesus would do would ultimately turn out to be good, but you don’t know what it’s going to be, and it may be quite surprising and even shocking.

Even if we knew exactly what Jesus would do in all circumstances, though, we still should not follow his example in all particular outcomes. It is not God’s will that we do this. It is not God’s will, for example, that we all follow Jesus’ example of being celibate in this life, or that we all try to walk on water, or perform miracles, or announce teachings on our own authority. We may (and must) look to Jesus for the fundamental principles that inform our life and conduct, but these cannot be applied in a simplistic WWJD manner.

So what about the claim that Jesus wouldn’t paddle anyone?

I don’t know that they had paddles in his day, but they did have comparable devices: belts, rods, and whips.

And we know that Jesus used at least one of those. According to St. John’s account of the clearing of the temple (quoted from the NAB):

He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money-changers seated there. He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” His disciples recalled the words of scripture, “Zeal for your house will consume me” [John 2:14-17].

These people presumably weren’t children, but they were behaving badly, and our Lord saw fit not only to spill their coins and overturn their tables (leading to a hopeless confusion and probable loss of income for the money-changes in question), he also saw fit to make a whip and start swinging it at people.

And note that he is swinging the whip at people. The text says that he “made a whip out of cords and drove them[i.e., those who sold … as well as the money-changers], with the sheep and oxen.” So he didn’t just use the whip on the animals. He swung it at the people, too.

It’s easy to say that it’s hard to imagine Jesus paddling someone, just as it’s easy to suppose that he wouldn’t splatter people’s money, overturn their property, and physically attack a group of businessmen. Surely the meek and mild Jesus would never do those things! Our God is a God of order, not chaos, after all. And violence never solves anything.

Yet here we have the Savior of mankind brandishing a whip.

It seems like Jesus might be willing to paddle quite a few people.

What do you think?

Before I go, two further notes. Catholic News Agency reports that the no-spanking policy may not be working out as hoped:

St. Augustine High School principal Don Boucree told the Clarion Herald that discipline at the school has suffered since the school stopped paddling five months ago. It has had to resort to a “zero tolerance” policy for unacceptable behavior.

“What has happened is that the infractions that would have stopped by now have continued to rise, causing the severity of the penalties to increase,” Boucree commented.

Fortunately, the parties may still find a mutually acceptable solution:

Fr. Chiffriller [head of the school board of trustees] said the decision would be revisited and discussed, while supporters of corporal punishment said that the discussion was not over.

Archbishop Aymond suggested prayer and dialogue as a way to determine God’s will and to resolve the issue.

Let’s pray for those on both sides of the discussion, that they may be openminded and charitable and together find the best policy for this school—whatever that may be.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

24 thoughts on “Who Would Jesus Whip?”

  1. The archbishop explained that he believes that “hitting a young man does not build character.”
    A belief is not a fact. In fact, there is generations of empirical evidence that this is wrong. There is no support for this in Tradition, but is, rather, a relatively recent, pseudo-scientific finding coming out of the Dr. Spock school of the 1950’s based on there mere argument from authority that was popular back then, being reinforced by liberalizing forces since then.
    Sirach 30 seems to be a fitting meditation on the subject:
    [1] He who loves his son will whip him often,
    in order that he may rejoice at the way he turns out.
    [2] He who disciplines his son will profit by him,
    and will boast of him among acquaintances.
    [3] He who teaches his son will make his enemies envious,
    and will glory in him in the presence of friends.
    [4] The father may die, and yet he is not dead,
    for he has left behind him one like himself;
    [5] while alive he saw and rejoiced,
    and when he died he was not grieved;
    [6] he has left behind him an avenger against his enemies,
    and one to repay the kindness of his friends.
    [7] He who spoils his son will bind up his wounds,
    and his feelings will be troubled at every cry.
    [8] A horse that is untamed turns out to be stubborn,
    and a son unrestrained turns out to be wilful.
    [9] Pamper a child, and he will frighten you;
    play with him, and he will give you grief.
    [10] Do not laugh with him, lest you have sorrow with him,
    and in the end you will gnash your teeth.
    [11] Give him no authority in his youth,
    and do not ignore his errors.
    [12] Bow down his neck in his youth,
    and beat his sides while he is young,
    lest he become stubborn and disobey you,
    and you have sorrow of soul from him.
    [13] Discipline your son and take pains with him,
    that you may not be offended by his shamelessness.
    Discipline is not abuse. Abuse is a very specific animal and, even today, we do not understand it very well. It makes me very angry, as a scientist, to see what passes for science In policy-making, these days.
    The Chicken
    [

  2. A parochial school where I used to live would call the parents into the school to determine the punishment. If the parent decided to administer corporal punishment, the school would allow the parent to do so. If the parent declined to come to the school, the student would be suspended for 3 days. It was the philosophy of the school that the job of parenting belongs to the parents.

  3. Corporal punishment in the age of the omnipresent lawyer and courts without common sense is too dangerous for the continued financial health of the school. It’s as simple as that. Even parents are not as free as they once were to determine acceptable punishments for their wayward spawn-of-loin. Do-gooders, ready with cries of “abuse!” lurk in every dark corner.

  4. “Who Would Jesus Whip?”
    WHOM, not WHO.
    Jesus is God, and He is permitted “whip” whomever He wishes to whip. Teachers are not God (nor parents of the children), so they are not so permitted. Jesus whips infallibly, never whipping an innocent person. Teachers do not whip infallibly, so they sometimes whip innocent children. Jesus uses the force that is necessary; he NEEDS to whip the offenders to dislodge them. Teachers never NEED to whip students, since various other means of punishment/persuasion can be used to obtain the same result. Forty or more years later, I do not think highly of the teachers that struck me.

  5. Jesus is God, and He is permitted “whip” whomever He wishes to whip. Teachers are not God (nor parents of the children), so they are not so permitted. Jesus whips infallibly, never whipping an innocent person. Teachers do not whip infallibly, so they sometimes whip innocent children. Jesus uses the force that is necessary; he NEEDS to whip the offenders to dislodge them. Teachers never NEED to whip students, since various other means of punishment/persuasion can be used to obtain the same result. Forty or more years later, I do not think highly of the teachers that struck me.
    Corporal punishment, properly administered, is not contrary to the Laws of God. As for the perfect administration of justice, if one were to accept this argument, then we might as well turn out everyone who is in prison, because we are not God and cannot exact a perfectly just punishment. Teachers have actual graces which will help them determine an approximately correct level of punishment, as do parents. Spanking is a time-honored method of correcting children. As I mentioned above, the hog-wash of not spanking (and I emphasize, again, spanking rghtly done) as if there were some science to this conclusion is a relativly new phenomenon in middle-class Western civilization.
    If a teacher struck you in roughly approximate justice, then one can, properly speaking, have no problem with him. There are many method of correcting children. Spanking is one of them. I am not impressed, personally, with some of the modern methods, which strike me more as bribery than child-rearing.
    The Chicken

  6. Where is the line between legitimate corporal punishment and abuse? I ask this in all seriousness, not snark. I am philosophically opposed to corporal punishment, and on a gut level it strikes me as at best unnecessary and at worst hypocritical and wrong, but I also know that on a practical level, generations of good parents have used it to no ill effects.
    The problem is that many parents who flat-out abuse their children think that what they are doing is a perfectly legitimate form of discipline (and I’m not talking just about the horrible, horrible parents who make the news — there are lots of “ordinary” parents whose children are highly resentful of and upset about the corporal punishment that was inflicted on them). I’ve heard of guidelines like “never do it in anger” and so on, but are these guidelines enough to to, well, guide the ordinary parent? Are there guidelines to help parents understand whether their children will respond well, or will be traumatized, since individual children can be so different? And what guidelines should an outsider (like law enforcement, pediatricians, child protective services) use to determine what is legitimate corporal punishment and what is abuse? What weight should we give cultural norms, and at what point will we say that regardless of those norms, the corporal punishment goes too far?
    It seems to me that because of these factors and the lack of a bright line between corporal punishment and abuse, and because the effects of abuse are so insidious and long-lasting and damaging, we are better off not resorting to it at all. But I’d be interested to hear others’ opinions.

  7. Who(m) would Jesus whip?
    That’s easy. Mariscal Maciel. The USCCB. Most of the Catholic bishops in the Western world. Certainly Bernard Law, Roger Mahony, Rembert Weakland, Groer of Austria, Vanghelewe and Daneels of Belgium.
    And that’s just for starters, people?

  8. Are there guidelines to help parents understand whether their children will respond well, or will be traumatized, since individual children can be so different? And what guidelines should an outsider (like law enforcement, pediatricians, child protective services) use to determine what is legitimate corporal punishment and what is abuse? What weight should we give cultural norms, and at what point will we say that regardless of those norms, the corporal punishment goes too far?
    When two people get sacramentally married, they are given the graces of the sacraments to help make these decisions. Because so many people live in sin, these lines are blurred. That does not mean that we need to stop disciplining, but rather, married couples have got to stop sinning.
    The Chicken

  9. Apart from contemporary educational theory and practice, the final pragmatic reason for catholic schools to phase-out corporal punishment is the history of clerical sexual abuse of children.
    Not because the two are causally linked but because they are linked in the minds of many people.
    It does not take too much imagination to foresee lawsuits, negative publicity (with sexual innuendo) involving a complaint against corporal punishment administered by a priest. From a manager’s standpoint, it is far simpler to remove this educationally controversial hostage to fortune.
    But more important than severity of punishment is clarity and consistency. Younger children need to learn the idea of consistent limits, initially from loving parents (who lose their temper rarely).

  10. School teachers, by role, teach, in a school. I cannot imagine that it is in their job description to ever need to administer punishment such as this. Why is this even being discussed?

  11. School teachers, by role, teach, in a school. I cannot imagine that it is in their job description to ever need to administer punishment such as this. Why is this even being discussed?
    Teachers in modern times in secondary schools fulfill the role of surrogate parents. Homeschooling would eliminate this.
    The Chicken

  12. Kids constantly use corporal punishment on themselves, and it works just fine. They fall down, it hurts, and learn to be careful when they walk or climb. They hit their head, it hurts, and they learn to watch where they are going.
    There is no malice involved. Pain is part of our inbuilt defense system.

  13. Masked Chicken: your use of ‘surrogate’ in this context seems flawed. Surrogate typically implies that the parent cannot complete the role in question, otherwise they would (e.g. surrogate mother). I stand by my assertion that teachers, by role, are not identified as those that we look toward to administer punishment. Parents, yes. In other words, the teachers report to the parents on the performance (or lack) of the student, and the parent has the prerogative (and obligation) to determine ‘just’ punishment.

  14. School teachers, by role, teach, in a school. I cannot imagine that it is in their job description to ever need to administer punishment such as this. Why is this even being discussed?
    Sorry, your understanding is flawed in that you have underspecified the role of a teacher. Instructing the ignorant (which is what a teacher does), is an act of mercy. It is also a position of authority within the context of the Fourth Commandment. By this aspect of teaching, a nun teaching a postulant is also a teacher, having both an instructional role and an authoritative role. Now, the authority of a teacher is not co-extensive with that of a parent and, hence, my use of the word, surrogate, which, in it’s derivation from surrogare, means to substitute, not necessarily in a perfect sense, but in an either specialized aspect or in a reasonably close extent. Thus, margarine is reasonably close to butter in the aspect of taste and a frozen banana may be a a surrogate for a hammer in the specialized sense of hitting a nail.
    What is a teacher a surrogate of? A teacher is a surrogate for the education normally provided either by a parent or life (note, both of those aspects – that is important – because there are some thing a parent may not be qualified to teach). The Vatican agreed with this, in broad fashion in a document it released in the late 1990’s on the role of parents, if memory serves (I haven’t read the document in some time, however). Now, discipline is important in the formation of an individual and it is a matter of prudential judgment how that discipline is administered. It may, in fact, be the case that the teacher has a better sense of what is needed than the parent, especially if it falls under the expertise of the teacher. For instance, some colleges allow junior high students to run fun experiments in some of their chemistry and physics labs on the weekends. I have participated as a teacher in some of these and I assure you, if I ever saw a student waving around, say, a Bunsen burner or a 5 watt laser, trying to singe the hair of some other student, I would not hesitate to grab the student by the scruff of the next and bodily throw him out of the lab, even if I went to jail. Parents are, for the most part, simply not qualified to judge the potential for harm from these acts. Leaving an unattended lighted Bunsen burner will get you tossed out of graduate school in some cases.
    Also, as surrogates, teachers are entitled to what is known as subrogation, which means, under law, the same level of respect as the original (hence, the connection to the Fourth Commandment). There are parent who, prudentially, spank their kids. As such, under the principle of subrogation, spanking, rightly done, is a prudential option for a teacher. Thus, spanking is, in fact, included in the role of teacher in almost exactly the same way it is prudentially included in the role of the parent.
    Since it is a prudential matter, people may differ on the use of spanking. I have my opinion (which is much more nuanced than a simple go/no go), but I respect the right for others to use whatever reasonable means for discipline they see fit. What I object to is the poor use of science and conjecture in outlawing it, as seems to be indicated in the article cited by Jimmy. Spanking may certainly be excluded within the bound of a prudential option, but not based upon imprudent reference to anecdotal evidence, as seems to be done in this case.
    The Chicken

  15. Should read…scruff of the neck…stupid auto-correct. 🙁
    The Chicken

  16. That should be .5 watt laser. A 5 watt laser will bore though the head of the student.
    The Chicken

  17. Physical pain can be either mild or abusive compared to moral guilt a student can be led to feel. I’m not sure why the insistance that physical punishment is necessary in even some instances when we want the students to lead good lives not through physical coercion but by free moral choice. If the spanking is what’s keeping them out of trouble, you have trouble.

  18. “If the spanking is what’s keeping them out of trouble,” then it’s working.

  19. Bishop Sheen defined spanking as: Depressing one end in order to impress the other.

  20. “”If the spanking is what’s keeping them out of trouble,” then it’s working.”
    So would keeping them chained to their beds. I don’t think “it works” is enough of a reason, by itself, to justify physical punishment. There are a lot of things that “work,” that nonetheless are or can be wrong.

  21. Personally, I’m opposed to spanking. I prefer a quick thump on the head. At least for boys.
    Well, as I have a cavernous angioma of the brainstem, a quick thump on the head could kill me. How is a teacher to know? Prudence must be used in the administration of any punishment.
    Still, has anyone every done a longitudinal study of the effects of spanking on the future development of children? I thought not. Dr. Spock was speaking out of his hat and so is everyone else until we have evidence.
    The Chicken

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