We must stop borrowing needlessly from the United States

Nov 12, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
Permit me to once again address this vexing problem of Corporal Punishment; to be or not to be. This topic was recently addressed by Mr. Roy Paul, the latest member of the “Ban the Cane” brigade. I’m “comfuffled” (to borrow a Paul Keens Douglas word) as to why, all of a sudden, corporal punishment is such a terrible thing.

The argument is advanced that corporal punishment causes psychological damage to children. It is described as violence against children and is said to ultimately cause said children to be violent. Now, am I losing my (mental) marbles or is this generation today which grew up on a diet mostly free of corporal punishment, more violent than the previous which was raised on CP. My generation should, according to the arguments trotted out by the “ban-the-cane” gang, be psychologically scarred and more violent than the generation that followed.

For those of us who grew up knowing if we passed certain behavioral boundaries, our fathers or mothers would tear into us with the whip or belt, be honest. Would you have been a better person had they used the overrated “time out” method suggested by the supposed enlightened educators? I cannot speak for you but for me, had I been given “time out” when I was a youth that would’ve been akin to a free pass for my misdeeds.
I was in teacher’s college in Georgetown when psychology was introduced to us: this new and supposedly better approach where the whip would be put away. When my batch mates and I went into the classrooms on our first teaching practice and declined the offer by the seasoned teachers in the field to use the cane, within a week we had resorted to the old method of discipline.

For, as soon as the children realized we were not going to use the cane, it was a free-for-all for them. The older and more experienced teachers used the cane but sparingly. The children already knew that if they overstepped their boundaries there is a consequence. Caning was an immediate punishment for one’s misdeeds, after which you were immediately returned to class to continue your studies. No wasting time with “time outs” and detention and a student not learning the fact that there are consequences to one’s actions; in this case, immediate consequences.
The basic problem is that anything the U.S. embraces is adapted as better, modern, and more enlightened than what we have in “backward” Guyana. A word to the wise: Guyana may be a Third World country but we are better at raising children than Americans are. (At least we used to be). Why are we blindly adopting a system of discipline from a nation known for undisciplined children?

They have vilified corporal punishment and replaced it with time outs and psychological approaches that have borne the fruit of rising violence in schools, a platoon of councillors who make little or no difference, metal detectors and a division of the police force assigned to schools to curb the violence this system has bred. It has also spawned a lucrative path for the pharmaceutical industry which dole out millions of dollars worth of pills designed to supposedly modify negative behavior in children.
Is this the road we’re choosing to follow? Can we afford the budget this “enlightened” approach breeds? Too many of our American educated policy makers are naively adopting everything from the U.S. without picking and choosing what is best for our society. Ten years ago we began removing corporal punishment from our schools.

Has discipline in our schools improved since? Are we going to blame the lack of enough councillors for this decline? Are we going to tell our parents to stop spanking their children at home because it is damaging them and giving them a low self esteem? When are we going to stop parroting everything the U.S. does and claims when, morally, their society is roaring downhill with no braking in sight?

In a previous letter to this newspaper I had alluded to other countries that were wise enough to retain corporal punishment in their systems; modern Singapore being one of the. Compare the discipline in these societies with that of the United States. I rest my case. When I was in Common Entrance class I remembered seeing a book in a book store entitled “We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against.” At the time I thought it was the longest title I’d ever seen. Years after, the significance of the title struck me. Are we there now?
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…” Romans 1:22
Malcolm Alves

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