Corporal punishment must remain an option for teachers

Clearly, Joseph beats the living daylights out of his children. I mean this seriously. I would suggest child services take a good hard look inside that dungeon.

Joseph I would agree with you if not for the impression it makes on children in society TODAY. In the days where all parents spanked, and the king would kill whoever he wanted, whipping was used in society, it would be beneficial. But today as it is looked at as evil, the negative results far outweigh the positives… I guess a good place to start would be to reinstate whipping for adults for crimes… Why start with the children? Yes there is a rise in chutzpa and unbridled self worship in society because corporal punishment is lacking, but if the only place a child is hit is within the world of Torah and mitzvos, and usually because of Torah and mitzvos, today that just leads children to hate Yiddishkeit altogether, and once a child leaves there is no ghetto wall to push him back. So you’re very much risking his chinuch by using such punishments especially if on a regular basis.

“Sometimes corporal punishment is the most effective teaching tool.”

Here we go again. After a brief hiatus, Joseph is back to advocate that we beat the stuffing out of defenseless children. Gedolim and educators of every stripe caution against doing so in our generation due to the destructive effect this has. How ever do we properly educate stubborn Joseph in this matter? Perhaps a good whipping will help.

CS was correct. Corporal punishment was never an effective educational tool. For that matter, shaming a child is also not an educational tool. And most of the time, kids react poorly to this infringement on their person.

But before the self-righteous wolves start attacking me about the Rambam and Shulchan Aruch, I must qualify. There is a limited place for discipline in schools. Once the greatest concentration is about the rules and the consequences, we have stopped teaching and the students have stopped learning. The true message of the beauty of Torah and Mitzvos cannot be learned in such an environment.

I have quoted before that there are treasures of seforim from the gedolim of the past many generations about chinuch (some authored seforim, others collected an anthology). Most of them address the subject, and I would turn to them for guidance on this subject. There are zero seforim who approach hitting as a good thing. At the most, they acknowledge that it can be a last resort. They also list prerequisite conditions. The rebbe/teacher cannot be angry, the “punishment” must teach not punish, all other forms of intervention have been exhausted, etc. If these criteria are not met, the pronouncement of these gedolim is, “רשע למה תכה רעך”, as this an aveiro, not a mitzvah. The Brisker Rov stated that under very specific and limited conditions, the first potch can be excused, but the second one is an aveiro – Min Hatorah! This is not a contemporary, secular, liberal mind.

What is most sad here is that a good rebbe/teacher makes lessons interesting enough that there is hardly a role for discipline. It is not an easy job, and definitely not handled by someone whose experience is just kollel study. Planning lessons is no quick task, and having learned the material is not enough to teach it.

How many readers here can cite the second half of the posuk without looking it up? חושך שבטו שונא בנו. Most would expect it to tell us that the one who truly loves the child should beat the daylights out of him. Rav Wolbe ZT”L points this out. I won’t kill the punchline. Go look it up. משלי י”ג כ”ד.

1. Corporal punishment is illegal. Do you really think it will never get out if it starts being used in yeshivas?
2. Kids now are different. They will not respond well to being hit anymore. They are much more likely to become traumatized and resentful.
3. Kids hit back now. The one time a teacher in my yeshiva (not a rebbi, but if it was the result would be no different) hit someone, the kid knocked him down and punched him. When threatened with discipline, the kid told the teacher “Go ahead! tell anyone you want! I’ll tell them why I hit you, and you will never get out of jail!”

Some OTD kids could’ve used a good slap, before it was too late. Everything is love until they end up In a bad situation.

Our mechanchim are afraid to hit

1: our mechanchim are telling parents not to hit.

1:

If your intent was the good slap, i disagree.

What I hope you meant was that proper chinuch involves the setting of boundaries. There are times when we need to say no. The permissiveness of the Dr. Spock generation was not good for anyone. The OTD kid was not disciplined appropriately, and was more likely to have experienced too much of the negative than the positive. Why else would the positives and love help?

Joseph: I fondly remember the Rebbes and teachers who taught with prizes and compliments, especially. One rebbe, when I asked a question on the first day of class asked who can answer funnybones kashya! Isnt tht a great question?! I learned much bettet tht year.
Rebbes who hit do so because they dont know how to each their students otherwise, they should look for a job elsewhere.

Having an opinion ≠ triggered.

DMB, Joseph has previously implied that he is very pro hitting people in general.

People used to get hit in school and they turned out fine.

I had a student in my class one year who could start a fire with nothing more than a metal wastepaper basket, three wet toothpicks, a paperclip and a used straw from one of those drink boxes. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know. The kid was a genius. I had another one who liked to stick green pencil crayons, point side down, into his nostrils and chase the other children around the classroom while pretending to be a walrus with a head cold.

Children act out because they need something. They act out because they need attention, because they need not to be hungry, they need not to feel embarrassed from something, they need warmer socks, they need more mental stimulation than the present curriculum is able to give or they need not to feel lost and alone in a curriculum that seems to come so easily and make sense to everyone else but them.

Shouting, singling out and hitting have never enhanced a child’s ability to learn. Children cannot learn in an atmosphere of fear or embarrassment. The only thing that hitting and shouting accomplish is dread, fear and hatred of school. Should that really become a teacher’s goal? To beat the joy of learning out of an innocent child who is only trying to tell you that he or she stands in need of something? I didn’t think so either.

Wow, Joseph, such a reaction from you? I didn’t know you could get triggered.

But even in the past, the better teachers wouldn’t have to resort to it and if they did it was a last option. Have you seen the story of Yitzchok Shaul in the Frierdiker Rebbes memoirs? That’s education.

Today’s kids are different because they have to be worshipped by parents and teachers. It’s 1960s values that aren’t based on reality.

“It’s a good thing Joseph works in the NYC Public Schools and can’t legally hit students. For those concerned about his children, don’t be. Joseph is all talk and no action.”

CT,

You assume that since Joseph works for the public schools and one of his children lived in your home for two summers that he’s not abusive. What if you’re wrong? I realize that Joseph is a nasty troll but plenty of red flags have been raised over the years and he clearly becomes most animated at the thought of violence against women and children. As an officer of the court, don’t you have an obligation to allow the authorities to investigate this matter as opposed to just assuming that he’s harmless? Could you live with yourself if your assumptions turned out to be wrong?

1:

You wrote: “Today’s kids are different because they have to be worshipped by parents and teachers. It’s 1960s values that aren’t based on reality.”

Either you’re being sarcastic, or you have some serious disorder. Your comment is bizarre. No one is worshiping kids. But you gotta understand something about chinuch that is often missed. The classroom and the school are about the kids, not the teachers or rebbeiim. That’s not 1960’s. That’s Torah. Perhaps you need to review the countless quotes in Chazal about the immense value of our children. How about אין העולם מתקיים אלא מחמת הבל פיהם של תינוקות של בית רבן? Maybe you will be more fond of בנינו ערבים אותנו as a prerequisite to מתן תורה. The main character in the yeshiva or achool is the student. The teachers and rebbeiim are there to serve them. No, the kids are not boss, and they cannot do just anything they want. It is the עיקר of the school day to provide the education to talmidim who should enjoy the experience and want more. NOT to make the teachers and rebbeiim happy. The good rebbe runs a class that the talmidim enjoy, and has the value system to have the internal and external smiles seeing the chinuch working. The good rebbe rarely turns to discipline. And the strict rebbeiim are either untrained, in the wrong career, or have class that is poorly matched for that rebbe.

It’s not about the 1960’s. It’s about the common situation of a rebbe entering a classroom to teach to a large class without the skills to manage that crowd. When he resorts to the equivalent of riot gear and tear gas, we have lost the dynamic of teaching, and have sunk into crowd control. Success would then be measured by the degree to which that rebbe has managed to cram the kids into his cookie cutter, and created enough fear to beat them into shape. This is an utter disgrace, and has zero connection to real chinuch or a derech of Torah.

No, I am not grouping all mechanchim into this category. But I am saying that there was a phase in the development of our communities where this approach was more prevalent, and it had horrible outcomes. Things have reversed a lot, and there are many who deserve credit for that. We are not out of the woods.

It’s not at all about worshiping kids. It’s about following Divrei Chazal without picking and choosing. They never advocated corporal punishment. Quite the opposite. They were quite advanced in their understanding of the human psyche. They knew that the use of fear and coercion will not produce אהבת התורה and all that follows from this.

@RebYidd I agree with you there. I think that the results of corporal punishment today would be traumatizing and harmful.

@phil ahh and this is what we call discussion. You argue that corporal punishment is permitted in certain cultural settings and situations whil Joseph may argue that it can be extended to differing cultures. Welcome to the table.

I think to a larger extent, we tend to disagree with the more draconian punishments listed in the Torah, and validate our feelings by thinking the Torah must ‘not have meant it for us’. Imagine if we would hold public floggings every time someone transgressed a lo saaseh with hasraah. The public outrage would be insane. Our 2018 minds can’t handle thinking that physical punishment is ever appropriate, yet the Torah is okay with it.

Uri22,

“Every time someone transgressed a lo saaseh with hasraah”? How often does this happen? I doubt that it occurred more than a handful of times since the Mekosheish Eitzim.

The Rambam, Maharal, and many other of the greatest Jewish thinkers have written that the Torah’s intention was not the practical implementation of these punishments, but the value system their prescription teaches. In truth, this is very nearly explicit in the Mishna which derides the Beis Din Katlonis.

The broader implication of your post is that you believe you have a better understand the values of the Torah than Gedolim such as Rav Wolbe and Rav Shteinman [who was quite emphatic in his rejection of corporal punishment], along with רוב מנין ובנין of contemporary Mechanchim and Poskim.

Sure, you’re entitled to an opinion…

“The concept of a total ban on petch by rebbeim is very very new; something that only developed during the last generation or two (or three – no more.)”

Joseph,

And that’s the topic at hand: should rabbeim be hitting children in our generation and contemporary gedolim tell us that it’s destructive to do so.