To bring it back to the classroom, if corporal punishment and a lack of corporal punishment both provide equally crap results in practice, what reason is there to hit kids?
Pain and suffering is the most natural, and often most likely, consequence of doing something 'wrong' and the easiest way that humans and other creatures all learn not to do certain things. Certainly no child is going to sit still for a loving, caring, 45 minute lecture on the intricate complexities of interconnected human society and the potentially immense chain of events that mean their simple act of stealing could conceivably result in someone dying. That's something they pick up along the years as they grow up. Heck, even many adults would struggle to consider all that before they do something, but by that point a general level of respect and subconscious grasp of consequence has already been learned.
Basically, there has to be some bite to your bark, or you're just going to get get ignored and walked over by people who don't give a toss about your 'words' of discipline.
You seem confused in your reasoning somewhat. Earlier you implied that a rise in violent crime and the lack of respect is down to people not being smacked at school anymore, but in the quote above the issue with road crime is down to a lack of policing.
In both cases people lack consequences and/or fear of those consequences, to keep their actions in check. No confusion.
Could it be that the rise in violent crime is also down to a lack of policing, and actually not some issue brought on by a lack of corporal punishment in schools?
Also yes, but not wholly. Lack of respect leads to the crime becoming a viable consideration, because, like, who is really gonna care about it besides you? Lack of policing leads to the consideration becoming a viable action, because, like, who's gonna stop you?
I don't do either because of the impact I might have on other people. If you want to frame it in selfish terms my parents taught me compassion, and making other people feel crappy makes me feel bad, therefore I avoid making other people feel crappy when it can reasonably be avoided, self managing punishment if you like, no outside influence required.
See, I never needed to be taught any of that, and it's something I was never actually taught either. It's just something you figure out. If needs be, you can figure it out when someone does it to you, but it becomes pretty evident that making someone else feel bad hurts them just as much as it hurts you and life works better when you don't do that.
You could put that down to all sorts of things, why are you so sure it is due to a lack of corporal punishment?
Kids not learning respect from an early age.
We were never caned or anything either and as a result we behaved like absolute ***** to just about every teacher who didn't present some sort of threat. For only a few did we have lines that were never crossed. The one that everyone respected the most and never messed around was the one rumoured to have flung a chair at a pupil. But even then, we knew we were undisciplined and we knew there was no consequence to our behaviour... and by that age, we were generally too big to be spanked very easily.
You have several generations of adults now that never faced the cane and the vast majority dont commit violent crimes.
The majority didn't beforehand either, but we still have far less respect these days. Just a general trawl through GD threads is proof of that.
Can you go into detail about the trend in violent crime?
I can't be arsed to get into yet another Google-fest to try and scientifically substantiate a conversational opinion.
Feel free to go find loads of reports and university studies that may or may not suggest that crimes are at an all-time low, or whatever. I simply looked at a few Police and BBC reports, as anything further is too much like being at work but without getting paid for it.... unless you're willing to pay me for my time spent collecting data, cross-referencing and analysing it?
Was there an increase when corporal punishment was no longer used in schools?
A quick look suggests that experts from around the world are quite divided on the matter, especially in places like Germany and Scandinavia so often hailed as the bastions of No-Smacking policies... Some say one thing, citing a bunch of reports, statistics and studies, while the others challenge the data and point out that the first lot have drawn conclusions that are the exact opposite of what the data actually shows.
