April 14, 2004
" I view public school as a burning building -
and I'm going to save every child I can."
- John Holt author, How Children Learn
We in the Anti-Corporal Punishment Movement now have a hero. His name is Ralph McClaney, an assistant principal in a Mississippi school who resigned his position after refusing orders to paddle a sixth grader.
The Washington Post reported how the young assistant administrator in Meridian, Mississippi, refused to paddle a sixth-grade girl who had sassed her teacher. Mr. McClaney had been ordered repeatedly by his supervisor, the principal of Carver Middle School, to administer the "discipline". "The idea of a big white guy hitting an 80-pound black girl because she talked back to the teacher did not sit well with me," McClaney said. "I did not get my master's degree in education to spend my time paddling students." So he quit.
What was the school's justification, the rationale, for hitting kids with wooden weapons? McClaney's boss, Carver Middle School principal Earnest Ward, explained it this way: "The point is to get the students' attention, not to inflict pain." Hitting children with boards is not intended to cause them pain, is his thinking. Hell, he can cause some of them pain without even assaulting them: "Sometimes all you have to do is hold a paddle up, and it will scare a student to death," the professional educator said. "Others are not afraid of it at all."
McClaney's personal journal reveals that when he accepted the position he was not informed that he was expected to batter up to 10, even 15 pupils a day. "These kids are different, all they understand is the paddle ... walk the halls and, if the kids are out of line, burn their butts," Principal Ward later ordered him.
Doing bodily harm to children, especially to those with black skin, is a form of entertainment, or recreation, in the Bible Belt. Of the 28 U.S. states that have banned corporal punishment in schools, few, if any, will be found in the Belt. The joy of hitting someone defenseless, combined with "justification" from Proverbs, is not easy to deny to those who, themselves, were similarly treated when they were children. It rarely helps to simply explain that more has been learned about child rearing since the advice of Solomon more than 2,000 years ago, "hit them with a rod". And he didn't get that "wisdom" from God, he got it from his mother, who beat him. He retaliated by keeping over 300 wives and concubines, and building a tower to Molloch, the legendary beast who entertained himself by tossing children into a fiery pit. Not surprisingly, Solomon beat his son so badly he destroyed the city his father built. This is the childrearing expert that is widely quoted and celebrated, simply because it's in the Bible.
But it's no good arguing that way with those who are intent on making children pay in pain what they themselves suffered and suppressed. Especially when the so-called "educators" on the school staff think that way. The Post article illuminates the point:
"Are we going to believe man's report or God's report?" asked Cherry Moore, a special education teacher at Carver and co-pastor of a local church. She believes that Old Testament references to "spoiling the child by sparing the rod" should outweigh the allegedly negative effects of corporal punishment cited by child development experts...
Some if not most Meridian teachers and parents approve of hitting their young charges with the paddle. Three swats are all that are allowed per child/offense Evidently the moral question of battering defenseless children does not enter the discussion. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Mississippi leads the nation in school paddling with nearly 10% of its pupils thus abused annually. In Meridian, parents are given consent forms to sign regarding corporal punishment. Some 80% of the parents, a huge proportion of whom are single parents, give permission to paddle.
McClaney gave up a position that paid $53,000 annually, a job not easy to find in
Mississippi. Hoping he could refuse to paddle on grounds of conscientious objection, he inquired at the state attorney general's office as well as the attorney from the teacher's union. From both came the answer: he could not refuse to obey "a valid, legal order".
Months later, Ralph McClaney was still looking for a position in his chosen career as
educator.
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