IN France this week, a schoolteacher was fined 500 euros for slapping one of his students.
The case dates back to last January when the teacher, Jose Laboureur, asked a student to tidy his desk. When the 11-year-old refused to do as he was told, the teacher threw the boy’s belongings to the floor. The student responded by insulting the teacher. It is then that the teacher pinned the boy against the wall and slapped him.
As parents how would you feel if your child was slapped in class? Angry? Yes. But with whom? With the misbehaving child or with the teacher who dared raise his hand against him? Does a teacher have the right to discipline a student by hitting him?
In France, as in many European countries, the law outlaws corporal punishment in schools. In the US and in the Middle East, it is still commonplace.
In this instance the father of the child was outraged that his son should be punished in this way. First he tried to resolve the matter within the school system, but when all the teacher got was a verbal reprimand, he decided to take it further. It just so happens that the father of the child is a policeman (a gendarme to be precise). Aware of his rights, he duly filed a complaint for “violence against a minor”. The teacher was promptly arrested and thrown in a cell overnight before being charged with “aggravated violence”. On Thursday this week, a court found him guilty and fined him 500 euros.
The French educational establishment is in uproar. So far 26,000 signatures have been collected in a petition supporting the teacher. Moreover, the public mood is also one of support. Essentially people are fed up by the lack of discipline and rampant unruliness in French schools and feel that physical punishment is an effective way to deal with the problem. But they are wrong.
Violence generates violence. Children who see a teacher “gain respect” by hitting their students learn that the way to succeed is to be violent. They are more likely to go home and hit their siblings or to be involved in fights. The child who has been hit may initially become compliant because he fears another punishment, but he or others are unlikely to remain compliant when the teacher is away or to genuinely learn from the experience. Fear is not conducive to learning. Furthermore, if a teacher needs to hit his students in order to get them to comply, he has manifestly already lost control of his class.
And the same applies to parents. Just consider the parent who slaps a screaming child in a supermarket. Is the fact that he or she needed to resort to violence not simply evidence that this parent could not control the child in the first place? How is it that some parents can get a child to behave just by telling them firmly that they should stop whilst others need to scream and shout and then raise their hand to their child?
There is a misperception that outlawing slapping, smacking, spanking and any other form of physical punishment — as more than 18 countries have now done — means that parents are being told to be lax with their children when it is quite the opposite. Disciplining children for misbehavior means finding an effective means to prevent them from repeating that behavior, but you can punish a child without violence, and that form of calm, thought-through punishment is more likely to make a child understand why he should not behave in that way, which in turn makes him more likely not to do it again. If you consider the boy who slapped the teacher, he responded with anger to anger. When the teacher threw his things to the floor, the teacher was guided by anger. And when you are in that kind of angry rage, you are incapable of thinking, anger takes over.
Over the last decade, psychologists have built a whole body of evidence that shows that physical punishment is at best ineffective and at worst harmful to children. From a correlational perspective, children who have been hit are more likely to be aggressive or to commit anti-social behavior, to have poor relationships with their parents and to be physically abused. As adults, children who were hit are also more likely to be aggressive, to commit crimes and to physically abuse their own children or their spouses.
It astounds me that people so readily think that the answer to violence is more violence. It is the equivalent of the logic of countries that bomb other countries in order to “achieve peace”. Those who are physically bigger and stronger can always resort to physical might to gain control over those who are smaller and weaker. But at what cost? It is the difference between a lasting peace and a cease-fire. The first is a result of talking, thinking and understanding, the second is a result of violence. And when it comes to children, if you want to teach a child not to hit another child, is hitting that child an intelligent thing to do?
