THE TIME IS NOW
Bob Keeshan "Captain Kangaroo" addresses corporal punishment
How much longer will our nation wait before joining nearly every other
developed nation in
banning corporal punishment in schools?
By Bob Keeshan
Bob Keeshan - more familiarly known as Captain Kangaroo - shares his
views of corporal punishment in schools in this Keynote Address at the
first National Conference to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools in
1988. First published in The Humanist, November/December, 1988.
Forty-eight hours. In the next forty-eight hours, you could board
an airplane and, after a
short stop to sun yourself on a beach in Hawaii, make your way to
the People's Republic
of China, where the corporal punishment of students is forbidden.
You might choose to
ignore the famous advice of Horace Greeley and go east, good
person, go east. Board a
plane at O'Hare and travel to the United Kingdom and Ireland, where
the corporal
punishment of students is forbidden. Make your way to the
Netherlands, Belgium, France,
Spain, Switzerland, and Austria, where the corporal punishment of
students is forbidden.
Move on to Denmark and Sweden, where the corporal punishment of
students is
forbidden. Then, cross behind that political veil, the Iron
Curtain, to the Soviet Union,
where for over seventy years it has been forbidden to use corporal
punishment in Soviet
schools.
Forty-eight hours. You have chosen to forgo exotic travel to
foreign lands to spend the
next forty-eight hours at home in the land of promise, the land
that boasts of its devotion
to children, our United States of America. You have chosen to
occupy the next
forty-eight hours questioning why, in 78 percent of those United
States, it is still legal to
strike a child in many of our schools. You will ask why a
seventeen-year-old honor
student, brutally beaten until she hemorrhaged, was told by the
august Supreme Court of
North Carolina that any punitiveness is justified. No North
Carolina school board may
forbid any teacher from hitting any child with any weapon for any
reason.
Forty-eight hours. In that time you will question the sanity of
events in a rural Georgia
community. An emergency room physician sees the welts and deep
purple bruises on the
thighs and buttocks of a twelve-year-old and does what he must do
under the law: he
reports a possible case of child abuse. 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.
Forty-eight hours. 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. It is an outlawed practice in eleven
states and in individual
school districts in many others--St. Louis and Chicago, for
instance. It is outlawed in New
Haven, New Orleans, Phoenix, Portland, Little Rock, Dade County
(Florida), and many
other individual school districts within states where paddling
teachers are otherwise
protected by law. 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.
I understand what it is
like to be slapped around in the classroom. I could live a life of
five hundred years and
never forget the sting of the heavy wooden ruler wielded by Sister
Alonzo. She ruled over
the eighth grade, but her terror was felt by first and second
graders who knew well her
cruel reputation. I can remember, in lower grades, averting my eyes
lest in her
capriciousness she would single me out for punishment for some
unknown transgression.
Did it do me some good, that stinging ruler laid upon my palm? If
it did, I wish God, in his
kindness, would make me aware of the benefits that did accrue. I
remember the
classroom of Sister Alonzo as being the most unruly, chaotic place
I have ever been,
despite the heavy wooden ruler and its frequent use. I can't
remember what I learned
there. I must have learned something other than the cruelty of
violence.
Despite the fact that our Constitution protects the religious
freedom of all of
us--fundamentalist Christian to atheist--by separating church and
state, we find some
people referring to religious dogma to justify public policy. In
the next forty-eight hours, I
am sure you will hear the quote, "He that spareth the rod hateth
his son...," from Proverbs
in the Old Testament. These words are not God's but Solomon's.
Despite his wisdom,
Solomon failed as a parent and raised a failure of a son, a violent
ruler who was deposed
by his people. In Deuteronomy, there is advice for parents on how
to handle a rebellious
son: take him by force to the elders of the city "and all the men
of the city shall stone him
with stones, that he die:" Anybody been to a good stoning lately?
Perhaps in the next forty-eight hours the most astounding
revelation for some of you may
be that corporal punishment of students does not work, does not, in
fact, achieve its stated
goal of the establishment and preservation of discipline in the
classroom to create an
environment for learning. It does not do what it is supposed to do.
Why, then, do teachers
resort to corporal punishment? Do they enjoy beating children?
Usually, no, but one of the
great dangers of the practice is that some teachers and
administrators do derive pleasure
from beating children, and the most horrific results accrue from
such aberrant behavior.
Protected by law, such individuals can only be restrained by
administrative procedure and,
in extreme cases, by the courts.
Why, then, do otherwise enlightened and even kindly appearing
teachers use corporal
punishment to enforce discipline? The answer may be that it has
always been available to
them. It's a shortcut. It usually stops the unruly behavior at the
moment, temporarily. It is
a shortcut in the same way that corporal punishment by parents is a
shortcut. It has no
positive permanent effects that we know of. It has many negative
effects. It teaches
violence as an appropriate solution to problem solving. It teaches
this lesson to the child
being beaten and to his or her peers even when the beating takes
place outside their
presence. They feel it in the next room or down the hall. Cruelty
is not mitigated by
distance; the psychological harm is done to all in the class and
the lesson of violence is
well learned. The most important point, perhaps, is that it does
not achieve the stated
purpose of maintaining discipline because it is treating the
symptoms, not the underlying
causes, of unruly behavior.
In the next forty-eight hours, you should come to realize that the
use of corporal
punishment is a failed practice. The child displaying unruly
behavior is a child crying out,
"Help me! Help me!" He or she may be ill-fed, hungry, or physically
or emotionally
abused at home. The child may be abused by parents, siblings,
foster parents, parental boy
friends, girl friends, aunts, uncles, and every being in his or her
life. The child comes to
school and we ask him or her to be quiet, curious, and excited
about learning, but such
behaviors are foreign to the abused child's state. Unruly behavior
is a cry for help, and we
answer such pleas for compassion and understanding with the end of
a paddle. Teacher
or parent, you cannot whip the hurt out of this child. His or her
behavior continues and
worsens and leads to failure after failure. He or she grows to
adulthood and becomes
another of our modern and enlightened society's losers--miserable
and a burden to all of
us.
In the next forty-eight hours, I know you will be armed with the
knowledge that there are
alternatives to the use of corporal punishment--alternatives that
maintain classroom
discipline and provide an environment for learning and a place for
effective and rewarding
teaching. What more could a teacher want? What more could concerned
parents want?
I say that parents should want more--a lot more. The elimination of
the use of corporal
punishment in every classroom in this nation and the creation of an
environment of
learning in each such classroom is, for me, just a beginning. I ask
for more. I ask that our
schools play a far greater role in our nurturing system. I ask that
our schools be not only a
place to learn but a place to meet the complete developmental needs
of our young people.
I ask that our schools play a greater role in the emotional and
cultural development of our
children as well as carry out their function to develop our young
people intellectually.
The children of America are at greater risk today than at any time
in recent memory.
Changes in society and changes in family structure have diminished
many of the
traditional resources for nurturing our young people. Two-thirds of
our children live in
homes where both parents are working away from home. Twenty-three
percent of our
children live in single-parent households, and almost all of these
single parents are women
working hard to make ends meet. Incredibly, 20 percent of the
children of this great
modern land of promise and plenty live below the poverty line.
Thanks to fast jets and fast
cars, many of us live far from our birthplace, far from our
parents, grandparents, aunts,
uncles, and cousins--the people who used to babysit and help raise
our children.
Mother comes home from work to a house without a spouse, tired and
depressed. She is
faced with the chatter of her latchkey child, about whom she has
worried all the livelong
day. Weary, she snaps at her child, telling him or her to shut up
and go watch television.
She has no one to comfort her, no one with whom to share the burden
of parenting. Her
mother is a long-distance telephone call away, and even a night
call is more than she can
afford. She is so alone and lonely. She doesn't mean to treat her
child this way but she is
so tired. Her child is the one who comes to the classroom the next
day and is unruly.
Instead of paddling this child into temporary submission, why can't
our teachers be trained
to recognize a child with problems and have at their disposal the
referral sources for
psychological help or family counseling? Why can't a teacher be
trained to recognize the
withdrawn child as a young human being in need and have at his or
her disposal the
resources for saving that child's life?
The training of teachers and administrators, the referral sources,
and the identification and
counseling will take money. We will probably need to decrease
classroom size to allow
teachers to meet the emotional as well as the intellectual needs of
students. Money,
money, money. But isn't the future worth such an investment?
Perhaps we shall be
required to spend a few hundred dollars per child per year. Would
we rather wait for that
unruly child to become a functional illiterate, an emotional
cripple, a burden to the state, or
wait for him or her to don prison gray at a cost of thirty-five
thousand dollars every year?
We must invest in our children today or pay the really big bucks to
cover our mistakes for
years to come.
Do we have a choice? No, we do not. We must invest in our children
or lose our
future--something we cannot afford to do. Americans are a better
people than that.
We must work toward our immediate goal: the elimination of the
pernicious and failed
practice of corporal punishment from every classroom in our land.
Then, we can work to
make our schools a vast family support system in which the
emotional development of our
children will be assured.
The time is now. The Netherlands, China, France, Spain, Austria,
Denmark, Germany, the
United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Soviet Union
have led the way.
It's time for the United States to catch up with what the rest of
the world knows.
Corporal punishment is a failed practice--destructive to our youth
and to our future. The
time is now. Let us abandon for all time the corporal punishment of
our children.
Bob Keeshan is one of the foremost figures in children's
broadcasting as a result of
his role as the host of "Captain Kangaroo" for nearly thirty years.
His program has
won six Emmy Awards, and Keeshan was honored in 1979 as Broadcaster
of the
Year by the International Radio and Television Society. Keeshan has
served on the
board of directors of the National Committee for Prevention of
Child Abuse since
1984. He devotes much of his time to over a dozen charitable and
civic
organizations.
