Are we sacrificing our intellectual competitiveness on the altar of mindless fear and compulsory conformity?
This week four high-school kids in the Hays, Texas school district, including the son of a sherriff's deputy, were arrested for making bombs and charged for possession of 'prohibited weapons' which carries a potential sentence of up to ten years in jail.…
Article comments
76 - Clavos
STM
Some kids need to be caned. I was one of 'em.
Didn't make me behave though.
So it doesn't serve any purpose
Uh, I don't think a test population of one kid could be considered to be "proof" of anything except STM's childhood stubbornness.
77 - pleasexcusetheinterruption12
If it didn't work on him, and he doesn't have strong reason to believe he was the exception to the rule, then the only person that I can think of that can explain his promotion of caning is Nietzsche. He doesn't promote caning because of its effectiveness at teaching a lesson, but because it satisfies the creditor-debtor relationship.
The general consensus here seems to be "I was caned, but I was tough and stubborn so it didn't work on me, but it will work on everybody else."
78 - Clavos
If it didn't work on him, and he doesn't have strong reason to believe he was the exception
Assumes facts not in evidence.
79 - Clavos
He doesn't promote caning because of its effectiveness at teaching a lesson, but because it satisfies the creditor-debtor relationship.
Excellent point, Mr. Nietzsche...
80 - Clavos
Oh, and BTW didn't Thorndike and Skinner do some probitive work on conditioning behavior, specifically by employing both positive and negative reinforcement?
81 - Dave Nalle
Uh, I don't think a test population of one kid could be considered to be "proof" of anything except STM's childhood stubbornness.
Even more likely is that it DID work on him, but he refuses to admit it, having channeled his stubbornness into denial.
Dave
82 - STM
Stop trying to turn this into a pseudo-intellectual wankfest, you blokes.
Caning didn't do any of us any harm, either. I knew exactly why I was being punished: it was because I was a young dickhead who was always playing up. The only time I refused to be caned was when I hadn't done what I was accused off, and the headmaster told me to piss off.
The cane DID make me sit quietly in class for a while ... mainly because my hands hurt so f.cking much. And yes, the idea was to tough it out in front of the other boys and pretend you didn't care.
Caning didn't work for me in the long run though. I remained as rebellious as ever right into my forties.
However, there were kids I knew who only got caned once because once was enough for them and they decided to behave. Most of the frequently caned, however, were incorrigible anyway.
But as I say, it did keep us quiet at school for a few days, which was doubtless the intent.
Except in England, where we also got caned on the arse. ("Bend over, boy, and pull your coat up." "Yes, sir, but I'm only getting the cane, aren't I?")
It just doesn't really hurt on the bum, as the sting is taken out of it by your clothing. Aussie teachers had the right idea. It's across the open palms and fingers or bloody nothing.
83 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
I was thinking that too Dave, but then that still leaves us wondering why he would be promoting it if he can't admit to himself why it worked.
Find a good parenting book that says caning works better than timeouts/detention/rewards/punishments of a non physical nature. Right now this sounds like more stubborness from stubborn old men in denial about the canings they got as stubborn children.
84 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
Excellent point, Mr. Nietzsche...
Why thank you. Oh and did you hear? God is dead.
85 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
Oh, and BTW didn't Thorndike and Skinner do some probitive work on conditioning behavior, specifically by employing both positive and negative reinforcement?
Yes. Who said anything about the nature of the reinforcement? What im reading says nothing about it being physical.
86 - STM
PETI: I went to all-boys schools. If they hadn't tried to maintain some discipline, it would have degenerated into total anarchy. It was always only one step away from Lord of the Flies at the best of times.
Bring back bloody caning, I say! The one thing it does do is instill a sense of respect - or sensible fear - for authority.
Hell, an Empire was built on boys being caned and bashing the shit out of each other on the rugby field.
America, you are getting soft. Harden the f.ck up before it's too late.
87 - pleasexcusetheinterruption
Well I dont know what kinda shit hole schools you went to, but most schools around here maintain plenty of order and get plenty of teaching done. Perhaps the kids aren't quite as afraid of their teachers as they used to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
88 - STM
We weren't really scared of the teachers. We just didn't care that much. What could they do to us? Cane us or send us home for a holiday. Big deal. And just to prove I'm not damaged by the cane, I really hadn't thought about it for 20 years.
My son also went to boarding school, and while they no longer use the cane, they struggled just as much to maintain discipline and order. Boys will be boys.
It always seemed like they were having exactly the same problems with the kids that they had when we were at school, except they weren't allowed to to belt them.
89 - Clavos
Yes. Who said anything about the nature of the reinforcement? What im reading says nothing about it being physical.
Apparently you haven't seen the movies of the chickens in the cages with electric floors...
90 - S.T.M
Mornin' Clav old boy ... this caning caning issue has stirred up a mini-hornets' nest within Dave's big hornets' nest, but in my view it's about similar stuff.
Really, it's just about how social mores have changed.
I am not seriously advocating the caning of boys at high school ... just saying that some kids probably do need a bloody good caning.
I don't think Peti realises I am from another "culture" ... if you could call it that ... and one where schools were segregated by sex and therefore the notion of survival of the fittest took on an even greater importance.
91 - Clavos
Morning, Mate,
As you've seen upthread, I'm with you on this.
You're right, US HAS gone soft, and it goes way beyond the caning issue, to where we are trying to take ALL possibility of danger out of kid's lives and insulate them in a cocoon of safety. I'm not talking about such obvious benefits as seat belts in cars, but when my sister had her first baby and came to visit us, she brought with her caps to cover the light sockets in my home, and locking devices for the kitchen cabinets so the kid couldn't get in and drink the Drano (lye, in case you don't have that brand in Oz).
Since I was a kid, we've raised about three generations of succesively more mollycoddled kids who have lost out on much of the FUN of childhood.
I can't remember the last time I saw a kid out on the street with a slingshot. Hell, I can't remember the last time I saw a kid out on the street in most middle class neighborhoods, including my sister's. They're all in organized activities anymore, and not allowed to just go out and play.
I'm a boating guy, as I've told you before. Our Coast Guard is currently lobbying Congress for a law that would require ALL people on a pleasure boat (regardless of size of the boat or age of the person) to wear a life jacket at ALL times while underway. Good grief! Boating itself is potentially dangerous inherently; why not just outlaw it altogether and be done with it!
Sorry for the rant, but the whole nanny state movement here in US really gets my goat.
92 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Stan, Clavos,
You guys would love Israel. They really messed up the school discipline stuff here, but kids in schools do fight, and you learn to handle yourself at an early age. In addition, kids are expected to be able to "walk the land." In Israel, that means climbing rocky hills, having good balance and taking long hikes.
My two boys stopped being American sissies when they came here. They are both independent and can take care of themselves if they have to - so unlike the old man.
Of course, Israelis have bad manners, little sense of class or discipline, and an immense amount of Hutzpá. And they drive like madmen...
93 - S.T.M
Yes, it's true ... I took my youngest daughter a few weeks back down to a swimming hole we used to go to when I was kid. It is out in the bush, about 10kms from a northern suburb and you drive down a long, winding drt road to get there.
It is actually a deep bend in a slow-flowing river that sits in a beautiful valley covered by impenetrable eucalypt forest. Once you've parked, you have to walk another 20mins on a track along the bank to get to the river bend. There, we used to have rope swing tied to a very high tree branch and from a sandstone rock platform high on the bank, you could swing out and launch yourself right into the deepest part of the river.
No one ever got hurt there, as far as I know, and we used to walk there from a mate's place, which took about an hour and a half.
Of course, now the government has turned the river bank path into a bushwalking track and you can't swing out from the rock as it's now got a timber barrier and a viewing platform there and a sign explaining about the local bush land fauna and flora (there are wallabies (small kangaroos) there in their natural state.
Plus, the rope has gone. Just to make sure, they cut off the branch. It was a hot day and we just went for a swim with no-one else around. But it was extremely disappointing for me not to be able to show her how we used to swing off the rope.
People here call the nanny state concept "the death of fun" ... which is a pretty accurate way of describing it.
The government department that took away that rope needs to be caned, en masse.
94 - zingzing
oh, ballderdash (or however you spell that). what's this nonsense about never seeing a kid with a slingshot or the government taking the swing rope away?
i was a kid not too long ago and i did all of these things. hell, i lived on a very long, very steep hill, which we used to climb all the time and get on our skateboards and bomb that motherfucker. we'd be going so fast (straight into traffic, mind you) that the board would be shaking so hard it was a miracle to get to the bottom alive. we played street hockey, full contact, in traffic with only a few of the kids having pads. we had a trail in one of the parks that was so dangerous (plants, bugs, high dropoffs, sharp rocks, etc.) that we called it the walk of death or some such nonsense. it was overgrown because people didn't want their kids around it. i had a slingshot, i shot things, i shot kids. i had a bow and arrow set. we hit eachother with sticks. we threw stones at each other. we climbed up on the roof and we jumped off the motherfucker.
i swung from tree branches.
yes, the stuff about drano and plugging the light sockets is good when you have a baby or toddler. it doesn't really go much further than that, unless you have an overprotective mother. protecting a baby (dumb motherfuckers, them) is a great idea. there's no knocking that.
but if you think that society suffers because teachers can't beat the shit out of students anymore, then you are sadly mistaken. parents shouldn't even have the option. no teacher or parent expects the same if they foul up. it's inhumane.
95 - S.T.M
"but if you think that society suffers because teachers can't beat the shit out of students anymore, then you are sadly mistaken."
We're not really serious about that zingzing. Have a good look at the tone of the posts. We're just talking about our experiences and how they might apply to Dave's quite lucid treatise on how things have changed.
Balderdash, eh? .... haven't heard that one for a while. Classic. That's about as British as it gets.
96 - zingzing
yeah. i suppose i wasn't really reacting much to the beating thing... as much as i was the total crap about kids not having fun anymore. no matter how much bullshit adults try to put in a kid's way, that kid will figure out how to have fun.
anyway, got kinda pissed off about that. dunno why. but it carried over into the whole teacher beating the student thing...
97 - Clavos
zing,
Glad to hear your childhood was much like mine. How long ago?
In my sister's toney (and sterile) Minneapolis suburb, you hardly ever see a kid ouside of his yard unsupervised, and they have a ZERO crime rate, so it's definitely overprotective parents at work there.
As I said, it's all supervised ORGANIZED stuff -- team sports, group activities, etc. Sports are great for all kinds of reasons, but I still think kids should have unsupervised time together just screwing around (well, not literally-at least not till they're 16 or so).
But, my sister and her friends are ALL very PC yuppie types -- don't know where she went wrong; she was a great kid!
And maybe it's my fault. I played a significant role in raising her (I'm 14 years older than she), and both our parents worked long hours, so she spent a lot of time with me minding her. Sigh.
98 - Clavos
BTW, zing.
Skateboards didn't exist when I was a kid, but we used to take our old skates (the clamp-on to the shoe kind) and builds a "car" with a wooden vegetable crate and a couple of 2X4s with the skates for wheels. Then we did exactly like you: full tilt down the steepest hill we could find and right on out into traffic as often as not. Theoretically, we had one kid at the bottom of the hill as a spotter, but that only worked sporadically.
Good times!
99 - zingzing
hmm. my dad's family comes from a small town about 80 miles west of minneapolis. the kids play outside all the time there. in the summer. before the mosquitoes come out. so, it's not minnesota.
i live in a spot with almost no children... i can't remember seeing one in recent times... i work in a spot with very few children as well. i never see children. it's great! fuckin little brats.
so, i can't say that what you see in your sister's neighborhood isn't just a bad example, and not a larger trend. there are too many negatives in that sentence. i'm too lazy.
but, like i said, kids will have fun. no matter what we stinkin adults try. shit. all i needed to have fun was a roll of tape. just tape your face up in some strange manner (nose going off to the right, eyelids taped down to your cheek, lips taped in permanent elvis sneer...) and go out in public somewhere. perfect fun.
i was born in 1979. so i guess i was at the peak of my time in the fun around 1990 or so.
100 - sr
Jet. Just get together with Shark and share nuke technology. sr
101 - STM
Yes, Clav, we do have Drano ... in fact there was a murder here a few years back where a Chinese stand-over gang forced one of their victims to drink it. Yeeaaah. Dreadful.
Yes, we did the downhill thing too. We called them billy-carts in Oz ... full tilt down the steepest hill, with some poor bastard on the back screaming and hanging on for dear life.
Also, when I lived in England, we had a little group that used to ride bikes no-handed down a REALLY steep hill. How no one was maimed during this period I'll never know.
Ditto in the surf back in Sydney.
In the days before leg ropes, there were riderless runaway surfboards heading at you at high speed from all angles.
I do have quite a few scars scars from that, though, including a shocker on my arm and a little doozy on my face where a fin went straight through my cheek.
At one stage my mum tried to ban me from the water in view of the mounting injury toll, which included broken limbs and infected cuts from a very hairy reef break. I just snuck out and borrowed a board.
102 - Dave Nalle
Also, when I lived in England, we had a little group that used to ride bikes no-handed down a REALLY steep hill. How no one was maimed during this period I'll never know.
Now as any teenager knows, it's WAY easier to ride no hands down a steep hill than it is to pedal uphill with no hands.
Dave
103 - STM
Yeah, but the downside is you lose a lot more bark when you come off
104 - STM
Although the uphill thing probably prepares you better for adult life ... going as hard as you can in a precarious balancing act and seemingly getting nowhere.
105 - Anonymus Canadian
So I hope you know we have a literacy assignment on this article for school. We have to comment on the subject of this article. Yeah, our school is cool, resorting to blogs due to lack of textbooks.
106 - Dave Nalle
You're not going to catch me saying your school isn't cool. Encouraging kids to discuss this subject is a hell of a lot better than the way most schools behave around here. Open discussion beats the hell out of paranoid reactionism.
Dave
107 - MUJEEB UR REHMAN
IM PAKISTANI NOW ITS MY 1ST DAY AT UR WEB. I DONT KNOW WHAT 2 SAY HERE
108 - AAMIR NAWAB SINDHI
plz dont vote to mark obama. for your bright future vote to helery.
109 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Boy I do miss SHARK - even when he bit my butt, he was entertaining.
110 - Earnest
The greatest problem in America is created by school districts run by liberal-antipatriarchal feminists. It is these feminists and their stooges who are the sole responsible for all the shootings in U.S. schools! Why? Because these callous lobbies are the main force behind the banishment of corporal punishment in schools! This punishment, as old as humanity, inhibits the testosterone by slowing down maturity! Boys and girls treated with corporal punishment remain boys and girls for a longer time ... and they like it! They may play with calcium carbide "bombs," which make noise but do not kill (the most popular passtime in post-war Poland). They study more diligently and respect their teachers. They respect their parents and strangers. They know that there are consequences to every "risky" behavior! A shooting of classmates in school is for them unthinkable! Their parents won't even allow them to play with fake guns! And they always obey their parents. What we have to do, is to purge our school districts of politically motivated immoral elements that stand on the way of corporal punishment in families and in the classrooms!
111 - Nick
you are damn right. These days I see many kids spirits bring crushed by one visit from the popo's. Ok so they are allitle restless but just think of what they could accomplish. We need to let our Kids show us what they know rather than us arrest them.
112 - Connor
In case you havent realized, they are throwing kids in prison for it to control the undesirables in society...my dad says that times have changed, and i think in a really bad way. i got a police referral for standing in an alley way once, the cops are dumbasses. a state trooper knocked me on the sidewalk when i was trying to get the glare off my phone. he thought i was trying to take a picture of him. i hate cops so much. ive been lighting off chemical fertilizer bombs for entertainment with my friend since i was 13. we/ve even made our own one, called a hellraiser, creates a big spray of exploding red sparks in the air and a ball of fire falls to the ground =P. im only 16, and im telling you we've been restricted more than any other generation in this country's history, im just one of the lucky ones...the only problem is that we can barely light any more of those things off anymore becuase we lost our open space to a fucking suburban neighborhood!!!
113 - Cindy D
Dave,
My husband, in the Jersey City of his youth was called Whiz, short for Wizard or Whizbang Willie (His name is Bill, William) because he knew how to make fireworks (bombs). You don't mess with Whiz. Unless you want your ass blown up. Which is how his potential opponents saw him.
My husband is a chemist. He loves MythBusters (thanks to me). They're always blowing things up!
Best be careful with explosives. They can blow up more than you anticipated. Happy fireworks!
(To the youth: Never let the police win. The police are the enemy of a just society. Don't take that out on the few good ones--please.)