Saturday, July 24, 2010

A school paddling is a BEATING (instictive hunters don't spank) + new DOUBLE BARRELED insight!


http://nospank.net/n-u88.htm

When I first wrote my 5 part essay opposing school corporal punishment I wrote:
"Being a male of the species who evolved primarily to swing a bat on meat I would have no problem personally paddling kids if only I could see their little office management inefficiencies as morally offensive (if only I could forget that kids who mess up the most are most likely to be emotionally messed up the most; a teacher can never tell)."

Lately I have been thinking that I must have been too insensitive to the pain I would be meeting out to the harmless school kid (for nothing yet: tardiness is just traffic control -- we don't beat people, least of all children for traffic control).
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Then I saw a silly auto insurance commercial where the lady salesperson for some reason brandished a full sized wooden paddle. Seeing the paddle I could fully envision myself pounding away on some poor kid"s flesh -- as hard as possible; can't cause any permanent physical harm; do the job!

What's behind this? Sociobiological answer: powerful male hunting instinct (overall concept filled out below -- point will be that there is very much an instinct).

What is the point of the hunter/killer insight for opposing school corporal punishment? Hunting instinct delivers a spanking BEATING -- not a spanking, doesn't it? [3 second illustration, click here: http://nospank.net/paddler3.wmv]

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Now that we have established a school paddling as a beating on a visceral, emotional level, we can fully appreciate why paddling a student for no legitimate reason could be prosecuted under the law as a violent assault.

Which in turn makes it harder to justify the exception for violent school beatings from Fourteenth Amendment mandated equal protection of the law. 90 of female corporal punishment and 75% of male are for tardiness -- traffic control. The rest could be said to be for office management (dress code, etc.).

Anti paddlers make a sales error -- they "define deviancy down, undercutting their own purpose -- by concentrating on the secondary mal effects of paddling. The correct sociobiological (how we are emotionally wired) approach, if you ask me, is that paddling is a violent beating (large) to correct little inefficiencies (small) on the part of school children. The core problem is that teachers have got this very backwards. If we don't seem to emphasize the serious violence itself why ask anybody to care about the secondary damage.
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(More info on evolved human male hunting behavior -- just to fill out the concept: Got claws -- or only nails? Got fangs -- or only HUGE fang roots (check them out -- ask your dentist what they are)? Got four feet? Send you off into the woods with a club and a sharp stick and you are not likely to return with the bacon? Got an idea -- like get the other boys? That is the only way you (plural) are going to trap a feral animal that relies on it's body -- not it's brain. UPSHOT OF ALL THIS: you, human male tend to think in the third person-cooperative. Try to get a new idea through to you and the first thing you are likely to think is what everybody else is thinking -- likely you will (instinctively) see no way to rearrange all that and the new idea may pass out of your head like it was never there. Just to fill out the concept...)
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FLASH -- NEW DOUBLE-BARRELED INSIGHT:
A few days ago it occurred to me that this hunter/paddler link could be stretched further: that maybe we beat children as an unconscious OUTLET for hunting instinct in our modern paperwork lives (who is into paperwork more than teachers and principals?). This is not to portray anyone as vicious. It can explain stories mostly from decades ago of some men volunteering to do the then frequent paddling for other teachers -- that is, explain that they might not be the monsters such stories make them out but possibly totally
unconsciously just outletting hunting instinct.

Today it occurred to me why we cannot beat adult fellow school employees with the all out effort with which we customarily paddle school kids (think of the gasping boy in the Boonville video). When we beat a kid like that we are not thinking of the pain we are inflicting at all -- not at all -- we are only thinking of the job. We could not beat an "equal" adult without thinking of the pain -- while only thinking of the job -- which is why we cannot beat a "social equal" employee we are obligated to fully respect.

At very least we can never do "the job" if we can think of the pain (not if we are normal I would say). Next thing to figure out (to wait for it to "occur" :-]) is exactly what allows us to think of the job only when beating a child -- a perfectly normal sociobiological (evolved behavior) expectation. In the meantime it might help the cause to share with school paddlers the insight that they could not beat a school child if they thought of the pain they were trying to inflict (they are trying to do "the job" with all their might) -- just could stop a lot of them in their tracks.

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